Friday, July 21, 2023

The Garden of Afflictions, by Olavo de Carvalho

The fundamental thesis of this monumental essay is that the history of the West is marked by the idea of Empire and its successive attempts at restructuring; even with different appearances, the same objective always remains: to expand the dominion of the Empire to the limits of the visible world.

Perhaps this is Olavo de Carvalho’s most discussed, and hardest to find, work. “O Jardim das Aflições” (The Garden of Afflictions) holds the stature of a masterpiece for many who follow the author’s lucid and tireless work.

If it is necessary to review this thesis, to assess how it relates to the political and social scenario of the present world, these are some of the questions that the author himself addresses in the unpublished afterword.

Acknowledgements

Many people helped me to bring this book project to life: Bruno Tolentino, to whom I showed the drafts of the work, tirelessly encouraged me to complete it, at a time when everything in my life tempted me to scatter my neurons on smaller tasks. Luciane Amato, Claudette Alves Ducati, and Jô Brito listened to the reading of many chapters, providing moral support and valuable suggestions. Dante Augusto Galeffi and his students from the Catholic University of Salvador restored my confidence in young Brazilian philosophy students—readers without whom this book would make no sense. José Enrique Barreiro, Kátia Medeiros, Luiz Afonso Filho, Maria Elisa Ortenbland, and Paulo Vieira da Costa Lopes assisted me in various ways, helping me overcome practical life troubles that, without their generous interference, might have completely absorbed me and perhaps disabled my poor brain for a few years. Roxane Andrade de Souza, Meri Angélica Harakava, and Sandra Teixeira solved a thousand and one small and big problems that would have indefinitely postponed the publication of this book.

This work belongs, out of affection and gratitude, a little bit to each of these people.

OLAVO DE CARVALHO

Epigraph

“...the War by Sea enormous
& the War by Land astounding,
erecting pillars in the deepest Hell
to reach the heavenly arches”.

WILLIAM BLAKE

“a blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that it was impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought. For perverse unreason has its own logical processes.”

JOSEPH CONRAD

“Car si désireux qu’on soit de trouver une cause naturelle
à ces tragiques abérrations, comment justifier leur raffinement,
ce je ne sais quoi d’inutile, de superflu, qui
révèle un goût lucide, une lucide déléctation?”.

GEORGES BERNANOS

("For, even if one is eager to find a natural cause
for these tragic aberrations, how can one justify their refinement,
this I-don’t-know-what of uselessness, of superfluity, which
reveals a lucid taste, a lucid delight?")

Editor’s Note to the Third Edition

The reissue of this book on the twentieth anniversary of its first publication is indeed a gift to the public: it is perhaps the most discussed and least found work by the author. The consistent analysis, skillfully conducted through exquisite writing, elevates The Garden of Afflictions to the status of a masterpiece in the opinion of many who follow Olavo de Carvalho’s lucid and tireless work. Many others might not confirm this verdict simply because they have not yet read the book, or at least not entirely. Well, here is the opportunity.

However, literary matters could not be the main purpose of this reissue. In fact, they are not: the relevance of the book’s main thesis – that the history of the West is marked by the idea of Empire and its successive attempts at restructuring, each time with a different guise but always with the same objective: to expand its domains to the limits of the visible world – is what leads us to reissue it today, as we find ourselves once again, and perhaps more complexly than ever, squeezed amidst the global struggle between giant imperialistic projects.

Whether it is necessary to review this thesis, assess how it articulates with the political and social scenario of the current world, whether it needs repairs or amendments, and what they might be – these are questions that the author himself answers in an interview transcribed in the unpublished afterword “What has changed in the world two decades later?” – another gift he bestows upon us.

Grateful, all that remains is for us to take it as a guide on this dantesque journey into the inevitable garden of our afflictions.

Author’s Note to the Second Edition

Despite the praise from Antonio Fernando Borges, Vamireh Chacon, Roberto Campos, Josué Montello, Herberto Sales, Leopoldo Serran, and many others, this book did not receive the attention from the public that was generously given to its younger brother, The Collective Imbecile. It enters its second edition after five years, while its companion had six editions in eight months. Nevertheless, of the two, this is the better and the only one that properly constitutes a book, a cohesive work with a beginning, middle, and end, whereas The Imbecile is nothing more than a collection of footnotes that did not fit in the margins.

Humbly requesting the portion of the audience that it believes it deserves, The Garden appears clean and correct, improved in language details and without the most visible errors from the first edition. But it has not been expanded: if there is a book in which the author said everything he wanted to say, it is this one.

Not that the presented thesis is considered final and untouchable. There is much to add and correct, but that can be done in other writings, and, in fact, I have been doing so.

I only reiterate the appeal that the reader not read this book with a biased and hasty approach, but instead follow the order of the chapters – and I ask that you understand this as a medical prescription, which, if followed poorly or imprecisely, will bring more harm than benefit.

OLAVO DE CARVALHO

Preface by Bruno Tolentino

From time to time in the life of the spirit, that leaden and low sky, in which Baudelaire saw the lid of the pot in which, according to him, humanity boils, clears up. These moments are rare, but they have a clarity of their own, exposing like never before the extreme poles of an old and smoky question: to see or not to see. Whoever has read this book from beginning to end will agree that they are living one of these privileged moments. Especially if, like me, they have sweated for weeks under the weight of the hundreds of impenetrable pages that our most renowned and least combed current philosopher, the anesthetizer of generations from the University of São Paulo, Dr. Gianotti, recently devoted to the investigations of Wittgenstein’s threadbare linguistic materialism. I am not belittling anyone’s effort; I am celebrating my relief that the lid of the pot has moved far enough away from me to let me perceive not so much where the Viennese’s linguistic labyrinth leads in its São Paulo version (“c’est assez que Quintilien l’ait dit”...), but where my unavoidable problems as a Brazilian cornered for decades by the futility of the unintelligible begin. I finally found out thanks to the clarity that, paradoxically, I found in the lesson of darkness in this book, “The Garden of Afflictions.”

Indeed, I found myself at the opposite pole of the perplexity I experienced during the reading—or rather, during the arduous mining I undertook in the tough and obscure sublingual galleries of that celebrated duo: the ascetic author of the “Tractatus” (or the “Investigations”?) and the former Pope Doc, current pale Pope of the blushing shock troops investigated in this garden of afflictions. Fortunately, in this latter case, like the lid that suddenly abandons the pot, I found an invitation to a different kind of investigation: the ones that deal with verifying the real based on intelligence and facts, never based on facts according to the intelligentsia. Sedimented over the centuries by the perspicacity of a noble lineage, this method of investigating the how and why of being-in-the-world, the mainstay of all philosophical verification efforts, has the advantage of respecting the data of reality, including the assumptions of knowledge accumulated by tradition, instead of seeking to replace them, data and facts, with the world-as-idea, inevitably always the idea of the world most in vogue at a certain moment. At the moment, this lapse of a mental time that never seems to end is still, and once again I have just confirmed it exhaustively, of the Marxist lineage, of university brand, and of dogmatic materialism, the three inseparable elements of the most learned Trinity that proposes to recreate the world.

Against all this, and in particular against the kind of Dr. Caligari’s Cabinet into which the venerable idea of the University is transforming among us, the vigor of this book rises with all its lucidity. An electrifying, rich, and complex work, but easily readable precisely because of, and not in spite of, the formidable erudition on which it is based. In this regard, only one caveat, the only justification for the intrusion of a preface into a work so clear, perfectly capable of saying everything by itself. The reader should take into account not so much the character of the author or even his ideas, but the task he has set for himself. Refractory to the transversal or hasty reading to which it sometimes incites, the central argument of this distressing garden unfolds like a crescendo to challengingly elucidate itself only in the final two parts: “The Arms of the Cross” and “Cæsar Redivivus” are the systole and diastole of the living heart of this alarming work. Thus, from the data of a problem apparently of no great importance on the plane of ideas (what does the suffocating little world of courtiers and doctors of another tropical Byzantium matter to those who actually think about the world?), the author extracts a stunning exposition of meanings, in an unsettling vision of the universal sense of the adventure of modern intelligence. Including, or especially, its carefully hidden meaning.

But do not rush, dear reader, there is no way to take this work only as a skillful expansion of a pamphlet. You must read it until its electrifying grand finale to grasp the full scope of this singular book. Its composition method, at first glance parallel to the symphonic procedures of a Sibelius, for example, is based on much older and more likely models. It is perhaps Olavo de Carvalho’s first effort to think publicly according to his “Theory of the Four Discourses,” a proposition of his pioneering essay, “An Aristotelian Philosophy of Culture” (IAL & Stella Caymmi Editora, Rio de Janeiro, 1994). According to Olavo de Carvalho’s Aristotle, from the objective schematization that attributes a sense-endowed figure to a set of sensible data (Poetics), discordant interpretations emanate, strengthened by the clash of the wills that support them (Rhetoric). On this critical mass of rhetorical efforts, dialectical examination would then be possible, confronting and hierarchizing, indicating the sense of a rational solution (Dialectics). Only then would it be possible to establish properly scientific methods and criteria, capable of leading the question to a maximally accurate resolution (Logic). The specific task of the philosopher would thus be to gather the questions at the rhetorical level and develop them into formal hypotheses to submit them to the search for a logical-scientific solution.

No wonder, then, that such a unique work, and ultimately as terrifying as the sound of an alarm clock at midnight, starts from subjective impressions and, through rhetorical combat, sets up oppositions that will only be definitively elaborated in the conclusion (in those last two parts, or “Books,” in the Augustinian sense), somewhat paradoxically, “à maneira de um tutti orchestrale,” in a set of dialectical investigations. Far from being an obstacle to understanding, the genesis and elaboration of the work here greatly help the reader: I found it very stimulating to progress through the “multiplicity of themes and plans that make up the composite fabric of this book,” as the author warns us in a note. In this, he finds himself in excellent company: in the West, post-Hellenic philosophy very early had among its peaks works like the “Confessions” of St. Augustine, to mention only a “composite” that at first glance has little ostentatiously philosophical, as understood by the “current” disciples of Dr. Caligari. The pedantry would fatten much later, and the present identification between philosophy and jargon adiposity is as modern a phenomenon as supermarket canned goods.

A blend of memories and philosophical essay, reportage and pamphlet, politics and metaphysics, the reading of this book (contrary to the brick with which the above-mentioned mentor of a philosophy as native as an import agency or import substitution has recently treated us) becomes all the more captivating and almost compulsive. Its erudite weight, without losing any density, does not become burdensome. Surprisingly, it comes from the same pen that recently gave us an extremely rigid “theory of genres” (see Olavo de Carvalho, “The Literary Genres: Their Metaphysical Foundations,” IAL & Stella Caymmi Editora, Rio de Janeiro, 1993). But perhaps the author, like any poet facing his own poetics, has given himself a code only to subject it to the necessary infractions of the creative act.

A semi-unpublished conference of his (“The Symbolic Dialectic,” existing only as a didactic pamphlet in the “Permanent Seminar of Philosophy and Humanities” of the Institute of Liberal Arts in Rio de Janeiro)1 helped me to elucidate the method of this most original thinker even in the form in which he shapes his discourse. From what I could perceive, unlike the Hegelian model, Olavo de Carvalho’s dialectic would not seek a future temporal synthesis but would instead go back to previous, “principle” conditions, so to speak. It would not be about the well-known “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” model, but rather, in the opposite direction, a tripartite movement of “opposition-complementation-subordination.” That is, our man seems to start from an observed antithesis “in the field of facts” to hierarchize the opposing terms and resolve them in the common principle from which they emanate. This principle, by nature, is always “prior” to those terms, either logically or chronologically, and not infrequently both. Until then, I had not found this method applied to the construction of a properly philosophical systematics, but in it, I seemed to recognize the rich tradition of symbolic hermeneutics. Another surprise from an unclassifiable thinker, and for this very reason, in my view, indispensable today, a rarity among us, due to the proven and classic values that forged and sustain him. I no longer hesitate: I consider Olavo de Carvalho’s thought paradoxically timeless and very contemporary, rough and lucid, unsubmissive and fertile far beyond the mere conjunctures of our wise and chronic tropicality.

Clearly, his “forma mentis” was forged by fire, in hand-to-hand combat as a self-taught person without alternatives in a country occupied by the legion of resentful or by the battalions of imbeciles, as it was at the time of the author’s intellectual formation. Yes, Olavo de Carvalho (in those times of such drought!) had to learn almost alone the vastness of what he knows today, and perhaps for this reason, he knew how to inscribe it in the scorching marble of the purest literary tradition of the West.2 Multilingual, tireless, and methodical reader, he wisely departed from his—and our—Father of All: Aristotle. He greeted and exposed the beautiful ghosts of Platonism, reverently passed through the cream of scholastic wisdom from St. Thomas Aquinas to Leibniz, reached Schelling and Husserl, these two modern giants, as far as I could tell. Along the way, he wisely circled both the Lilliputian potpourri of the many now celebrated “philosophers” and the ethereal minefield of Guénonism, without stepping on their explosive snake eggs, thank God! Needless to say, this recipe is not acceptable, much less familiar, to our entrenched university Marxism, as one can see. As has been seen, such a prescription is more appropriate for the addition of quotation marks to his well-deserved title of philosopher, much more deserved than diplomas, PhDs, chairs, honors, subsidies, and sycophancy from our dangerous “intellectual establishment”; or rather, “pendant,” a neologism “de rigueur” in the face of so many pedantic disputes and dependencies of the endless lists of canonized imports.

That is because, like any true philosophical vocation, Olavo de Carvalho’s is incompatible with the compulsive (and repulsive) alignment to which the owners of chairs, and their ilk, have accustomed us here. The twitching of “Mademoiselle Rigueur,” so pleasing to the factory of sterilized diplomas headquartered at Rua Maria Antônia, São Paulo, SP, may have discouraged the acquisition of prestigious titles by the person who perhaps possesses the most courageously individual intellect among his peers in our country today, but it also warned him about the true worth of what he lost. Without a doubt, the circumstance of this defensive and prophylactic solitude must have helped him to precisely delineate the mined terrain of self-castration due to shyness, subservience, or simply brazenness, so evident in our incipient and prudent “intellectual output.” In this exalted context, his scathing critique of the Epicurus-Marx binomial is pure heresy, anathema, suicide. But who would care to prolong life in the city of the dead, the zombies, the hypnotically hypnotized? The suicide—academically speaking—of Olavo de Carvalho, once again patent in this unforgivable book, sounds to me like the clarion of a postponed and feared resurrection of the critical-philosophical independence of the nation.

With this rigorous and intriguing investigation of afflictions—another book by the man from Campinas off the beaten path of those who import the formulas of the invention of the wheel—Olavo de Carvalho once again says to us loudly and clearly: enough of naps in the shade of utopia and mental lethargy; it is more than time to wake up, spit… and think! As for me, who found a country where there was once one, thirty years later, I found a depressing coupling of pedantry and show business, the joyful party at the funeral ends once again with this admirable book, our terrifying portrait, “The Garden of Afflictions.” Let the dead bury their dead; make way, reader…

Rio de Janeiro, July 1995.

Book I – Pessanha

Chapter 1 – The new history of ethics

§1 Introduction – What did Epicurus come to do here, or: Biography of this book.

“It is strange to find that, here and
in other parts of South America, men of undoubted talent
are often beguiled by phrases, and seem to prefer
words to facts” – JAMES BRYCE.3

A well-educated writer, like a good guest at the table, should not immediately start talking about themselves. I transgress here the good manners out of intrinsic necessity of the subject, which nevertheless consists – I can assure you – in things whose relevance transcends infinitely the person of the author.

The necessity I refer to arises from the following: this is, within certain limits, a book of philosophy, and a philosophical thesis means little if amputated from the reasons that lead to it and the motivating factors behind the question it answers. Hence the convenience of preliminary guarantees against a possible double misunderstanding: on one hand, the reader may embrace or reject the thesis in the abstract, without knowing to what things and beings it refers to in the life of this world; on the other hand, the reader may reject outright the formulation of the question itself, without taking care to follow to the end the thread of arguments where its true meaning will be revealed only then.

Against the first of these misunderstandings, I must warn that the opinions expressed at the beginning are just a beginning; accepting or rejecting them in limine prevents one from understanding where they lead; if the reader takes a position for or against early on – or worse yet, founds it on an impression of the moment – they will deceive themselves, taking this book as an expression of ready-made opinions when it is, as anyone who reads it to the end will see, substantially an investigation; an investigation that, from the middle onwards, takes a quite different course from what it seemed to announce at the beginning. 4

But against the second of the mentioned evils, there is only the recourse of recounting the facts, exposing the real and lived situation from which the question emerges. In the case of this book, this is absolutely mandatory: the events that suggested it determined the conditions in which it was written – which, therefore, are part of the subject.

So I say that the core of these pages was written in one night in May 1990, under the impact of the aversion that the words of José Américo Motta Pessanha had aroused in me, heard a few hours earlier in a conference on Epicurus in the cycle on Ethics promoted by the Municipal Secretary of Culture at the São Paulo Museum of Art. This may project the image of a fanatic, foaming with anger against the opposing opinion. But it was not like that at all. What Pessanha had evoked in me was not disagreement, whether fanatical or reasonable, indignant or meek. It was a disturbance of the soul, a disappointment, a hopeless sadness, a gloomy agitation full of bad omens. Mere opinions do not produce this effect. The title promised “delights,” 5 but there I had found only sorrows and afflictions. Epicurus’s Garden seemed strangely similar to the Garden of Olives.

I arrived home around midnight and, unable to fall asleep, I spent the night noting objections and protests that, against my conscious will to fall asleep and forget, kept springing from my mind like reactions of a feverish organism to the invasion of a toxin. That was precisely it: Pessanha’s phrases were an intoxicant that entered the audience’s ears, poisoned their brains, moved the axis of their eyeballs, making them see everything differently from what it was, in a crazy spin of the world’s canvas. A public of five hundred people submitted to intoxication with smug joy, in a morbid deliquescence, like children following a new Pied Piper of Hamelin, hypnotized by the mellifluous voice, by the play of images that gave the most obvious nonsense an intense coloring of reality. Pure enchantment, in the best Lair Ribeiro style.

I left in a state of stupor, unable to believe what I had just witnessed. At home, trying to fall asleep, I saw hallucinations of the MASP chairs crowded with eyeless zombies. I jumped out of bed with my head buzzing. Everything the audience didn’t want to see seemed to have condensed in my subconscious, demanding to come to the surface. Whether I liked it or not, I had become the revealing symptom of a collective neurosis.

What impressed me the most about Pessanha’s web of errors was its density. There was not a single breach there where an intelligent discussion could find its way. Each word seemed calculated to divert the listener’s attention, prevent them from looking directly at the subject, fix them in a state of apathetic passivity before the flow of suggestions, hypnotize them, and gently lead them by the nose to a conclusion they would no longer be able to judge and to which they would bow with a bovine smile of happiness and a voluptuous moo. The compact lump of absurdities exuded a debilitating radiation on the intelligences, produced a progressive accommodation to a state of twilight, of diminished lucidity, until, having lost all desire to see, the victim’s soul would adapt to the darkness like on a soft bed, inhaling the sweetened perfume of oblivion.

I don’t know if I’m making myself clear. There is a great difference between the dogmatist who simply puts a wrong idea in people’s heads and the sorcerer who sickens them, weakening their intelligences so that they can never again grasp the right idea. The first one commands an army of words, which can be confronted with words. The second one exerts an almost physical action, producing wounds in a deep stratum that mere arguments cannot reach. Insensitive wounds that will only begin to hurt when it’s too late to heal them – and when the memory of their origin is too faded to identify the aggressor’s face.

“Disagreeing,” even with fanatical vehemence, would be as absurd there as trying to stop a robber with citations from the Penal Code. The sorcerer’s action passes by consciousness like a neurosis, a vice, a drug; it leaps over the mind, disturbs the organs of the senses, moves tendons and muscles, establishes new involuntary reflexes; it evades human gaze and goes to exercise its dominion directly over the residual monkey that inhabits us; it cannot be undone by rational persuasion.

I left there feeling nauseous, like a genuine square leaving a party. Not that I had never seen anything like it. I had seen many, but only produced by avowed sorcerers, by professionals of psychic domination, in the recesses of obscure sects that did not adorn themselves with the prestige of academic authority or shelter under the protection of the State. I had also seen them in demonstrations of hypnosis, Neurolinguistic Programming, psychological techniques that, reducing the human brain to vegetal passivity, at least did not proclaim to be transmitting culture, self-awareness, critical judgment with that. What amazed me was that this kind of manipulation, suitable only for the treatment of mentally ill people inaccessible to conscious communication, or for pernicious and illicit uses, had left the confines of psychiatric clinics and occult sects, to be employed by academics as a substitute for the transmission of ideas. I was painfully aware of the intellectual decline in Brazil, the debacle of university education, but I had never imagined that it could go this far. I supposed that reducing thought to ideological babble was the lower limit of decadence, and I consoled myself with those words that grandmothers always say when you fall off a bike: “It won’t get worse than this.” Suddenly, the ground opened up: by Pessanha’s hands, the public was invited to dive into an abyss of unconsciousness, into the endless darkness of a definitive farewell to intelligence.

I had never seen José Américo Motta Pessanha. But I knew his reputation and had noticed in it a peculiar trait: his listeners left fascinated, praising the lecturer highly, but they were unable to give any clear notion of what he had said. They kept a diffuse impression, inexpressible in words, surrounded by a halo of mystic prestige. To some, I objected that the same thing happened to Hitler’s listeners, but in response, I received that condescending smile with which the holder of a beatific secret marks the distance that separates them from the profane. I appeased my concerns by explaining this reaction as the audience’s snobbery, without suspecting that it might provide some clue to the character of the speaker. I just thought he was an abstruse guy, whom the audience compensated with applause all the more generously the greater the understanding it denied him. Nothing, absolutely nothing, made me anticipate what I found at MASP.

I couldn’t reconcile myself to sleep. After five failed attempts, I assumed it was a vivid symptom and headed to the nearest couch – the typewriter – to verbalize the neurotic contents that Pessanha’s magic had injected into my brain. As always happens in such situations, verbalizing them was enough to exorcise them, undo the macabre enchantment, recover the sense of reality momentarily numbed by the arts of a sorcerer. This exorcism constitutes two-fifths of this book, where, along Pessanha’s arguments, I examine the philosophy – or whatever it is – of Epicurus in order to cure myself of it forever.

On the following night, I read the manuscript to a group of friends and kept it, intending to give it a final form later and send it to Pessanha, inviting him to a reply if he was interested, before publication in a book.

Unforeseen events and rushes of a life unusually full of them prevented me from returning to this work, which remained unfinished and crude, at the bottom of a drawer, and accompanied me through a change of city and five house moves. Various occupations diverted me to other subjects. I dropped Epicurus, forgot Pessanha. Deep down, it was what I wanted.

It was only in late 1992, when considering the reasons for the sudden and unusual popularity acquired by the word “ethics,” that I realized the role that cycle of lectures had played in discreetly preparing events that would later grow and fall on the country like a storm. It had been a barely audible starting signal for the “Ethics in Politics” campaign.

I then felt the impulse to resume this work. But, in the tangle of papers I had brought from São Paulo, compressed into fifty-odd boxes, I could not find the manuscript.

In the following months, the course of political events took an unexpected and, for me, enlightening turn. The “Ethics” campaign, which had begun as a broad movement of moral awareness, committed to uprooting some secular vices from our political mentality, increasingly narrowed its objectives, until it concentrated on a single immediate target: the removal of Mr. Fernando Collor de Mello from the Presidency of the Republic. Once this goal was achieved, the campaign celebrated the event as if it had fully satisfied its desires, as if the nation’s deepest moral demands had been fully satiated by the simple removal of that unfortunate leader.

Meditating on the events in light of Hegel’s precept, according to which the essence of a thing is what it ultimately becomes, I then concluded that the political destruction of Mr. Collor de Mello, and the consequent rise of the left to a dominant position, had truly been the only objectives of the campaign, which did not begin by proposing such general, broad, and profound goals, but rather to better achieve the particular, narrow, and shallow target that interested it. It is true that tout commence en mystique et finit en politique, but what was astonishing in the episode was the disproportion between the amount of mystique that was mobilized and the pettiness of its political outcome. A nationwide campaign that relies on a philosophical background, appeals to all intellectual forces of civilization, summons the wisdom of past sages, and assumes all the airs of a cultural revolution just to eliminate a political opponent or a handful of them is truly one of those cases where an excess of lead only pathetically highlights the lack of birds. Rulers much more powerful than Mr. Collor, states, regimes, kingdoms, and empires had been overthrown with much less intellectual investment. Later, when the campaign resumed, this time against deputies and construction companies, the “ethics” that was claimed finally assumed its true nature as a mere impulse of political revenge aimed at blatantly selective targets. 6 All of this is very normal in politics, where each faction always seeks to arrogate to itself the monopoly of good. The strange thing was that the unprecedented mobilization of the intellectual class did not give the campaign even a semblance of rigor, seriousness, or moral self-awareness; that the farce of an ethics reduced to crude expressions of resentment seemed to satisfy all the brains entrusted, in principle, with being demanding with themselves. Apparently, TV anchors had become guides and mentors of the most pompous and authoritarian intellectual elite, who let themselves be guided by slogans with festive credulity, as if the destruction of their political adversaries were worth the abdication of all critical intelligence. Friends with whom I discussed the case explained it as a revenge: like monkeys beating a dead jaguar, the leftists sought compensation for two decades of humiliations, pursuing the remnants of a dictatorship they had failed to defeat and that had only dissolved by its own will. But the explanation, although partially true, did not satisfy me. The retaliation was too late, the enemies were almost all dead or forgotten, and the moral militants did not hesitate to recruit notorious servants of the military governments, such as Senator Jarbas Passarinho, for their troops. It was not possible that, after so much time had passed, the desire for revenge still had enough strength to cloud all intelligences, to cast aside the most basic demands of love for truth in exchange for politically dubious results. We were, in short, faced with a strange phenomenon, whose singularity, however, seemed to escape entirely from those who were its protagonists. 7 And – I conjectured then – perhaps it would be possible to find, in the general oddity of the national environment, a principle of explanation for what I had seen at MASP.

Amidst this expectation, I could no longer postpone resuming this work. Searching through my papers again, now with the investigative dedication of a “PT spook,” I located the manuscript and made the additions that seemed necessary at the time.

I made no substantial changes to it. I only rearranged it slightly, added the final chapters and this beginning. The initial part—from §2 to §17—is the text from 1990, trimmed of excrescences, expanded with indispensable clarifications, and hopefully improved in the details of expression. Some corrections were very meticulous but left the overall meaning unchanged. I also added numerous, lengthy footnotes. Many footnotes are one of the most amiable human inventions. Apart from their moral function of acknowledging a writer’s gratitude to their sources of material, aside from the economy they afford us by abbreviating an argument through references that the mere title provides, beyond the true or false appearance of scientific integrity with which they clothe the content of a book, besides the pedagogical benefit of opening a fan of complementary studies for the reader, and even beyond the undeniable psychological pleasure an author can derive from erudite display, apart from all these appreciable and reassuring things, they give us something even better. They represent, within the body of a book, the seeds of countless other possible books, the lines of investigation that had to be abandoned so that the book could reach its final point. Abandoned but not disregarded. Their presence in the footnotes confesses that this is not the only nor the best possible book on the subject. The same author, speaking to the esteemed public from where he stands, can now envision many others, even better, in his thoughts. But for now, he could only write this.

Today, I am amazed at having written so much in just one night. But, on second thought, it couldn’t have been otherwise. Pessanha’s speech was so full of implications, veiled intentions, and camouflaged messages for the “happy few,” that more than contesting it, it was necessary to unravel it, to reveal the entire worldview it smuggled beneath the explicit meaning of the words. As this worldview, in turn, called for reinforcements from past eras to support a present-day policy, it could not be elucidated without greatly expanding the circle of investigations, with many back-and-forths between the surface of current politics and the deeper layers of an almost-forgotten antiquity. The area of implications was so vast that anyone who ventured to explore it gradually, a few meters a day, risked losing sight of the form of its entirety. To counter the diffuse and intoxicating influence that Pessanha’s words spread in the air like a spray, an extra effort of compression was needed to squeeze the diverse multitude of evanescent ghosts into a limited and visible area. I believe this could only be achieved all at once, in a sudden stroke of a swordsman or a Zen painter, to preserve, amid the multiplicity of themes and approaches, the unity of a simultaneous intuition.8

The news of the death of José Américo Motta Pessanha, which occurred in early 1993 but of which I only became aware much later, did not change my decision to publish this book, already prepared, in the part that closely relates to him, since 1990. Three reasons support my decision. First, despite vehemently challenging Pessanha’s ideas here, I say nothing against his person, nor could I, as I am ignorant of everything about him. Second, the death of a philosopher does not make the false ideas he defended true, nor does it exempt one from the duty of challenging them, for the defense and clarification of the living, who could not do so while he was alive. Third, any malign influence Pessanha may have had on the public did not come from him as an individual but as an active member of a group; this group remains alive and well.9

As for the tone, that of this book is sometimes so frank that it might be out of place in learned debates, at least in the half-light of hypocrisy that has become the official standard of educated language in our country. But this is not about discussing ideas, comparing various images of reality with a common devotion to science to find the best. For certain people, ideas are not images of reality: they are magic potions used to bewitch the public and put it at the service of ends that, lucid and informed, it would not collaborate with in any way. A spell is not discussed theoretically: a spell is broken by displaying the victim’s tufts of hair and scraps of clothing that the sorcerer, in a furtive incursion, hid among cadaver remains. Therefore, it is not a matter of refuting erroneous arguments, issued with the innocence of an mistaken search for truth. It is a matter, as in psychoanalysis, of unearthing old, forgotten lies, uncovering intentions that have something sinister about them, revealing evil so it perishes exposed to the light, amputated from the darkness that nourished and protected it. I don’t take pleasure in doing this work. I do it out of an inner obligation, from which I fled as much as I could, as evidenced by the delay of this book in relation to the events that motivated it. I do it with resigned goodwill, but I cannot hide the repugnance I feel when dealing with this kind of material. I hope that some of the stronger expressions I employ in the text will be forgiven as natural outbursts of a man who has to speak about what he would prefer to forget.

Some readers may say that I have given undue importance to a superficial and passing event: refuting a simple conference does not require an entire book. The objection would not be entirely unreasonable if this book took Pessanha’s conference as its object, rather than a simple occasion and sign to show, in a journey through two millennia of the history of ideas, the entire circle of remote conditions that made it possible and from which it extracts all the significance it may have beyond the political trivialities that constitute its immediate motivation. These conditions are the theme of the book. A rather modest event can become illustrative of the greater movement of history when identifiable forces intersect in it, those forces agitating on the surface of the day and those that come, furtively, from the depths of the centuries. An author whose name escapes me suggested, to symbolize the pinnacle of insignificance, the quarrel of two elderly people in a nursing home. He forgot to say that the core of the plot of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a book that condenses the entire drama of 20th-century ideas, is nothing but the altercation between two elderly people—Naphta and Settembrini—in the tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos. And Perez de Ayala made the bickering between two old men with soft brains—Belarmino and Apolonio—the summary of universal quarrels; in the end, the old men make peace… when they meet again in a nursing home. As seen from the example of these geriatric hostilities, what is of little significance in itself can mean much in terms of the causes it reveals. Towards the end of this book, the reader will see how the character from the first paragraphs will become small—the faint and distant echo that, in the periphery of history, mindlessly repeats the age-old song of deception.

On the other hand, the Brazilian habit of regarding cultural manifestations as superfluous adornments prevents one from perceiving the tremendous practical consequences that philosophical ideas, even if disseminated only in a narrow circle of intellectuals, can trigger on the lives of millions of people who have never heard of them and, if they did, would not understand them. Now, nothing more closely resembles an external adornment, a harmless botanical pastime of daydreamers, than a conference on Epicurus’s Garden in Motta Pessanha’s florid style. According to Brazilian superficiality, only a lunatic like me would think of seeing something deadly serious and dangerous there. But, with mad or sane eyes, what I saw was there, hidden and lethal beneath the flowers. I can prove this, but I will not do so in the Introduction because I do it throughout the rest of the book.

To put the objection to rest, I allow myself to quote the only author whose complete works I can boast of having read and for whom I nurture a certain esteem mingled with melancholy and disappointment: myself. “A constitutive law of the human mind,” that author said in A Nova Era e a Revolução Cultural, “grants error the privilege of being briefer than its rectification.”

Moreover, as the reader will see, especially in the final pages, this book does not merely undo one or several errors but positively points to the direction where the truths they deny and obscure should be sought. Here, the sketches of a comprehensive interpretation of the cultural history of modern Western civilization can be found, an interpretation that might be better presented in systematic form and outside any polemical context. These ideas are the primary origin and goal of this work, which only by their value or worthlessness may be judged, and not by the great or small importance of the facts, local and momentary, that gave occasion and pretext for their appearance.

Another request. Let the tone of this book, and above all, the fact that this is already my third combative work,10 not lead anyone to hasty conclusions about the author’s temperament, a peaceful and tolerant subject to the limit of stupidity. For criticism, as John Stuart Mill said, is the lowest faculty of the intelligence, and in the order of publication of my writings, I preferred to start from the bottom, from the noisy present, reserving the higher and calmer parts for a better occasion and letting them show themselves only now, in the form of notes for my private courses, while the ideas mature and assume a better verbal form.11 My students can attest that polemics are far from constituting the center of my interests. I also declare categorically that I have no illusions about influencing the course of events, which goes where it pleases and never consults me (which is just as well). My purpose is not to change the course of History but to attest that not everyone was asleep while History changed course. I did not write this book thinking about its possible political effects, but solely to enlighten a small circle of friends and readers who desire to be enlightened and judge me capable of helping them in that regard.

Nor do I even pretend to change the opinion of those who like their own. Nowadays, people create opinions like pets, substitutes for human affection. As for my opinions, I treat them with bread and water, Swedish gymnastics, and lashes, leading many of them to perish from starvation, strangling others in their cradle, or crushing them with blows of facts that contradict them: I keep those that survive. I cannot recommend this regimen to sensitive souls, but I know of no other that can put us on the track of truth, assuming we desire it. And if here I subject others' ideas to this merciless treatment, it is because some of them were once my own—and, as Goethe said, we are most severe against the errors we have abandoned.

§2 The conferences at MASP

In the midst of the general outcry against the lack of ethics, the voice of philosophy finally rose to enlighten the people’s minds and guide the nation towards the path of goodness.

It is a tradition for philosophers to abandon the silence of meditation and speak to the people in times of scandal and ruin. Socrates wandered through the squares, demanding the rights of conscience, which had been debased by the abuses of rhetoric. Leibniz, shocked by the war among Christians, called for the union of churches. Fichte, standing atop a crate of beets, rallied the Germans to defend the national honor trampled by invaders. Philosophy has long taken on the responsibility of guiding the world when it becomes disoriented and bewildered, unable to find its own way.

Philosophers are so essential in such times that, in their absence, nations appoint honorary philosophers or, in more modern terms, “philosophes.” This is how the term emerged, referring to the ideologues of the French Revolution. The difference is simple: a philosopher seeks to explain the real according to their own demand for truth and based on the level reached by their predecessors; a “philosophe” seeks explanations only within the minimum framework required by the world they follow. Speaking from atop a crate of beets, both can have the same effect, as the difference lies on a level beyond the public’s perception. For the public, Voltaire is as much a philosopher as Leibniz or Aristotle.

In the Brazilian case, the role of national philosophical conscience has been attributed to a group of university professors orbiting around Marilena Chauí, holder of the Municipal Secretary of Culture, organizer of the “Ethics” cycle at MASP, and last but not least, author of an acclaimed “Invitation to Philosophy,” which offers some precious lessons to its readers, such as stating that, in Aristotle’s logic, “accident is a type of property” – more or less equivalent to saying that, in Euclid’s geometry, a square is a type of circle.

Let us see what the national philosophical conscience, thus represented, has been able to do to lead a lost nation back to the path of ethics.

The stated intention of the course organizers was threefold: to provide a chronological overview of the main ethical doctrines, shed light on the issue of ethics deficiency in the country, and make the debate more accessible, opening it to an audience of five hundred and something laypeople. However, the selection of topics and the content of the conferences ultimately contradicted the first two objectives and nullified the third.

In any scientific or philosophical debate, the understanding of a new thesis depends on knowledge of the state of the question. “Status quæstionis” – an ancient rhetorical term – is a retrospective of the discussions up to the present, with a careful discrimination of the topics covered, both those agreed upon and those still in dispute. When speaking to laypeople about a subject within their expertise, individuals are implicitly obligated, by the ethics of intellectual life, to provide them with a summary of the state of the question as recognized by scholars. Personal, new, or divergent opinions that the speaker may present can only be comprehended and discussed productively when viewed in the context of this consensus – even more so when they diverge, as every divergence diverges “from” something and only acquires meaning when compared to it. Benedetto Croce said that one only understands a philosopher when one knows “against whom he raised his polemic.” If, however, the specialist, the professor, or the person vested with academic authority presents their opinion in isolation, without the connections that positively or negatively link it to the consensus and tradition, the lay audience will inevitably take it as if it were the expression of that consensus itself, attributing to the words of a single individual – or the group they represent – the value and weight of a truth universally accepted by cultured people.

It is also a basic principle of the scientific method not to present a new theory without first proving that the previous ones are insufficient to explain the phenomena in question. This is a means of avoiding the proliferation of useless theories. From this principle, which is also valid in philosophy, arises a practical norm: new theories should be the ones to present their reasons against the old ones, not the other way around. As in a duel, the challenged party has the primacy in choosing the weapons. This norm, in turn, imposes an ethical pedagogical obligation that I mentioned: every new theory, when presented to a lay audience, should be shown as such, framed and contrasted against the background of the consensus it confirms or denies. It should never be presented in isolation, occupying all the space and pretending to be the consensus itself. Using it in such a way takes advantage of others' ignorance to claim authority.

One would think that such recommendations would be unnecessary for individuals filled with such ethical conscience that they cannot contain it within themselves and feel the urgent impulse to pour it over the entire nation, or at least over five hundred minds. However, the version of the history of ethical ideas presented in the cycle is quite different from what the public would have access to if they turned to any of the histories of philosophy circulating in book format. It is a peculiar version – let’s say alternative – which has every right to be defended against the consensus but has no right to pose as the consensus before an audience unaware of it.

For example, the chapter on Greek philosophy was summarized in two conferences: one by José Américo Motta Pessanha on Epicurus, which I will comment on in more detail later, and the other by the French guest, Nicole Loraux (by the way, excellent), on ethical feelings in Greek tragedy. Epicurus, in almost universal consensus, is not exactly a minor philosopher, but something lesser than a philosopher. We will see more later. And Greek tragedy, as a work of art, laden with obscure archaic symbolism, admits many other ethical interpretations beyond those highlighted by Nicole Loraux (who would, I believe, be the last to deny it). In the end, Greek ethical thought was reduced to the meager and marginal thread of Epicureanism and to a vague and mysterious “feeling” that flows between the verses of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides. Not a word about Plato, Aristotle, or Stoicism: about the three comprehensive systems that constituted the essential moral heritage of Greek civilization to European and Islamic civilizations.

No one denies the organizers of the series the right to reinterpret history as much as they want. Not even the right to disfigure it in the name of any theory, altering the hierarchy of facts and the proportions of values, pushing the main articulating connections of the whole into a corner and pulling any detail of their preference to the center, no matter how insignificant and banal it may be. It is only asked, to those who proceed in this way, the courtesy of declaring in advance their purpose of presenting a new and heterodox version of history, and not “the” history, in the usual sense. A history of Greek ethics that places Epicurus at the forefront instead of Plato and Aristotle cannot avoid, at the very least, the label of extravagant. But to commit extravagances with the innocent air of someone who acts according to the most routine practice is what, in popular ethics, is called “cara-de-pau” (brazenness). And nothing is more comfortable for a brazen person than to count on the foolish approval of a naive audience, incapable of perceiving the extravagance of their behavior. There, shielded from any gaze of censure, they spread out and revel.

Rolling, rolling, the self-importance elevated to a historiographic principle ended up falling into an even worse debacle when it comes to medieval philosophy: it squeezed the whole of it, with its almost one thousand years of history, into a single conference, and even there it only approached it, with ferocious selectivity, from a single privileged aspect, which, taken as such by the credulous mass of listeners, is considered the quintessence of the subject. What aspect was that, so special? The Augustinian morality of self-consciousness? The Thomistic ethics of reasonable choice? The moral pedagogy of Hugh of St. Victor? The moral indeterminism of Duns Scotus? None of that. None of these topics, nor the many others into which medieval ethics is divided in the books of the History of Philosophy, was considered significant enough to represent, at the MASP, the essence of the Middle Ages. The theme entrusted there to appear as the supreme sample of medieval thought was… the tribunal of the Holy Inquisition!

Historically, it is a quid pro quo. Officially established in 1229, “this institution – as emphasized by Alexandre Herculano – was born weak and developed gradually and slowly”.12 Its period of most intense activity, which gave it the bloody image it has for us today, only begins from 1400 onwards: in the midst of the Renaissance. The fires of the Inquisition continued to burn throughout the early modern period, reaching their peak of fury in the 16th and 17th centuries. This is as medieval as Newton’s physics.

Even the century of the official establishment of the Inquisition, the 13th century, which does not coincide, I repeat, with its effective operation, is only the end of the Middle Ages: it is the beginning of its dissolution, with the outbreak of the first manifestations of national autonomy, of which the very spread of heresies, the immediate cause of the opening of the Holy Office, is one of the main symptoms.

Thirdly, the period of the most significant inquisitorial activity is already two centuries later than the end of the cycle of production and publication of the main medieval philosophical works, which range from St. Anselm’s “Proslogion” (1070) to Duns Scotus’s “Reportata Parisiensia” (1300), including the books by Peter Lombard, Peter Abelard, Alexander of Hales, William of Conches, Hugh and Richard of St. Victor, St. Albert the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Bonaventure.

To complete, none of these philosophers held any position within the Holy Office nor had significant contacts with this entity, except episodic ones that did not markedly influence the content of their works.13

Therefore, associating the Middle Ages with the Inquisition, and particularly medieval philosophy with the Inquisition, is a chronological blunder equivalent to saying that Fernando Henrique Cardoso was the Minister of Finance under D. João VI.

The philosophes of MASP know these dates as well or better than I do, and they couldn’t have gotten them mixed up by mistake. They know very well that the Middle Ages are a scapegoat for the wrongdoings of later historical periods, and that its inquisitorial reputation follows Stendhal’s definition of fame: the set of misconceptions that posterity weaves around a name. But they also know that this reputation is deeply rooted in popular superstition, where it was planted by a succession of highly successful fiction works, from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum to Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.14 And, since the public believes in the legend, why bother denying it? Why not take advantage of it?

The advantage taken, in this case, was to avoid any examination of medieval philosophy, diverting attention to a more violent topic, hence, more conspicuous, with the added advantage that this philosophy, without having been directly contested or even discussed, was thus surrounded by a bloody halo. By automatic extension, the halo also ended up surrounding Catholicism in general, to which that philosophy is closely associated. In terms of rhetoric — the art of achieving maximum persuasion with a minimum of arguments — it was an admirable tour de force: tarnishing the reputation of the opponent, without even having to mention their name.

But the question remains: why? For what purpose would a group of intellectuals, openly committed to the moral salvation of the country, engage in such a compromising endeavor as telling the people a history of ethics that violates ethics in order to falsify history?

§3 Pessanha and Western thought

A clue could be found, perhaps, in José Américo Motta Pessanha, one of the most prominent members of the group. In the selection of the works that make up the series The Thinkers by Editora Abril, of which Pessanha was the organizer and editor, the same distorting selectivity that now inspired the program of Ethics had already manifested itself, with some years in advance. The most significant of scholastic philosophy — St. Thomas, Duns Scotus, Ockham — had all been squeezed into a single volume, more or less the same size as those individually granted to the economist John Maynard Keynes, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, and even Voltaire, a great rhetorician and journalist who, as a philosopher, could not be taken seriously.

The distortions didn’t stop there: Pessanha had found it indispensable to dedicate an entire volume to Kalecki, an economist who is not mentioned in any History of Philosophy,15 while omitting Dilthey, Croce, Ortega, Lavelle, Whitehead, Lukács, Jaspers, Cassirer, Hartmann, and Scheler. At the time of the edition, trying to explain to me the reasons for such bizarre choices, I conjectured that Pessanha might not have intended to illustrate the History of Philosophy, but rather the History of Ideas. In this discipline, theories are not worthy of attention for their intrinsic value but for their public repercussion, for their socio-political effects, whatever their worth may be. This would explain the title of the series (“thinker” is a broader and more inclusive term than “philosopher”) and also the inclusion of lesser-known authors, such as Condillac, Helvétius, and Dégerando, typical philosophes.16

But I soon had to abandon this hypothesis, as the collection included works that only had an influence in well-defined circles, such as Wittgenstein and Adorno, while omitting others that had produced true revolutions, such as Jung and René Guénon, who opened the doors of the West to the invasion of Eastern ideas, or Spencer and Thomas Huxley, who injected evolutionism into the spiritual veins of the world. Not to mention Lenin or Gurdjieff.

In the end, the reader of The Thinkers, if they were to form their image of the history of thought solely from this collection, would conceive it very differently from what they could obtain in any book or course on the subject (except, of course, the USP course, where Pessanha’s group reigns).

To further complicate the imbroglio, the series The Thinkers, in a country where few philosophy books are published17 and where foreign editions are accessible to only a select few, has acquired an authority comparable to that of Bibliothèque de la Pléiade or Oxford Classics, representing, in the eyes of the public, the image of universal thought.

In the end, the program of Ethics had only continued, on another scale, the work of distortion that Pessanha had already begun on his own.

But there was still the question: what was the meaning of this endeavor?

It was only when I heard Pessanha’s conference that I could understand, retrospectively, the principle that had guided the selection of the books: Pessanha had not sought to portray the past but to shape the future. He had not chosen the books based on their value or historical importance, but on the impact he intended to give them. He did not want to reflect the History of Ideas in the image of the texts but to produce it in the field of facts. The selection did not reflect a theoretical criterion but the decision of a praxis. It was not about History but about strategy and marketing.

The same spirit seemed to have guided the selection of themes for the course on Ethics, and through it, I could also capture retroactively the perhaps unconscious inspiration behind all the titles in the series of events promoted by the Department of Culture: the gaze that those people cast upon the world did not reflect the image of an object but projected onto it the sense of a passion. Pessanha’s circle was not a scientific community engaged in discovering the real but a militant group determined to fabricate it.18

In this operation, Pessanha played a strategic role, not only as the editor of The Thinkers but also as someone who, in theory and practice, was well-versed in Rhetoric, being a disciple of Chaim Perelman, the great renewer of rhetorical studies in the 20th century, whose works he was, if I am not mistaken, the first to introduce in Brazil. But Perelman made a distinction, following tradition, between the rhetor and the rhetorician: between the persuasive speaker and the scholar of rhetorical science. Perelman was essentially a rhetorician, an investigator and codifier of the principles of rhetorical argumentation. Pessanha, on the other hand, qualified primarily as a rhetor, as a master of persuasion, as an orator and a man of marketing. And he did not lack occasions to demonstrate his talent (which, before employing in political persuasion, he had tested in a series of culinary publications in the same publishing house). Together, the series The Thinkers and the three events The Gaze, The Senses of Passion, and Ethics — not to mention the pedagogical militancy in the USP chairs — form the most extensive enterprise of rhetorical persuasion ever carried out in this country by a group of activist intellectuals with well-defined political objectives, willing to lay the groundwork for the conquest of these objectives in the realm of cultural struggle.

This still does not give us an answer as to the ultimate reasons for the selection of themes in the course on Ethics, but it already puts us on an important track: if there were serious distortions of truth, they were not accidental but coherent continuations of actions initiated long before. The intention implied here and the values that are incorporated into it are what we need to discover in a microscopic analysis of Pessanha’s conference. But even before delving into more details, what has been observed so far warns us that the strange conjuncture referred to in the §1 of this book was even stranger than it had initially appeared. For, if there was already an unusual disproportion in the volume of cultural resources mobilized for the achievement of a target as small as the simple removal of a corrupt official, it was even stranger that a university elite, elevated to the intellectual leadership of a national-scale ethical reform, showed itself to be so ignorant of the most elementary rules of intellectual ethics, so eager to falsify History, prostitute science, and lead the people down a deceptive path, all in the name of moral objectives that could be reached much more quickly and easily by following the old and good straight line. And the more I delved into the matter, the more inexplicable the whole thing seemed to me. There was no choice but to conduct an in-depth investigation, going back to the earliest intellectual roots that inspired this new and singular conception of ethics. It was necessary to question Epicurus.

Book II – Epicurus

Chapter 2 – Epicurus' Cosmology

§4 An Epicurean profession of faith. Matter according to Epicurus

“The Delights of the Garden”, the second conference of the Ethics cycle, delivered by José Américo Motta Pessanha, was not merely an exposition of Epicurean philosophy: it was a fervent profession of Epicurean faith and a declaration of war against all critics of Epicurus. Epicureanism was portrayed as one of the greatest philosophies of all time, holding the solution to all human woes and the inspiration that Brazil needs to escape its moral quagmire.

Driven by the bellicose enthusiasm that always animates the advocates of a saving doctrine, Pessanha did not hesitate to take daring liberties in defending his guru. On one hand, he spared no sarcasm in ridiculing the dialectical acrobatics through which St. Augustine, a notorious opponent of Epicureanism, sought to reconcile the goodness of God with the existence of evil in the world. On the other hand, Pessanha did not hesitate to defend an opinion that, to be sustained, required no less circus-like logic: the opinion that intellectuals' withdrawal to Epicurus' garden is not alienation or cowardice but a superior form of political struggle. Epicurus taught that the philosopher should abandon all efforts to reform society and retreat to a contemplative life in the solitude of the countryside. To propose this as an effective remedy for prevailing corruption is like recommending fleeing far away from creditors as an effective method of repaying debts.19

But strange opinions are not surprising for those who declare themselves followers of Epicurus, as the traits of the master should be found in the disciple. Epicurus produced dozens of opinions that became unsurpassable models of absurdity, making him a classic in folly.

The question is not whether Pessanha fared better or worse than Augustine in his devoted endeavor but rather why, in a cycle ostensibly dedicated to shedding light on current and urgent questions, someone took the trouble to unearth the philosophical mummy covered in millennia-old dust, only to sweep it under the rug later.

To probe the reasons for this mystery, the solution to which will bring forth the answers to all the other questions mentioned earlier, we need to go back to Epicurus himself and, since someone before us has already exhumed the mummy, show the advanced state of decomposition in which it is found.

A particularly whimsical aspect of Epicurus' philosophy is his alleged materialism, quite different from the crude metaphysics we usually associate with the term and related to it solely in the distance they both keep from any true philosophy.

According to Epicurus, the body is material, the soul is also material, and even the gods are material—only differing in the degree of density of this so-called “matter” among these three levels of beings.20 Since everything is material, only the material reaches our knowledge. Therefore, following Epicurean syllogism, everything that reaches our knowledge has material existence. Even the objects of our dreams and imaginative visions have material existence according to Epicurus. If we dream of gods, this already proves, according to him, that they exist materially, as something immaterial could not affect our senses.21 However, as we cannot find them anywhere in this mundane world, they must exist in some other world. Nevertheless, as every existing world is always material like ours, they can only reside with their bodies of subtle matter in an interworld, or a gap between worlds. According to Epicurean ethics, proposing this as an effective remedy for prevailing corruption is similar to recommending fleeing far away from creditors as an effective method of repaying debts.

Although gods are material like us, they are composed of subtle and rarefied matter, and therefore more durable. However, Epicurus also affirms the eternity of matter, which creates the following problem: If matter is eternal, why would it be less dense precisely in the more enduring beings and not in the more ephemeral ones? It is like saying that a painted surface is bluer the more diluted the blue paint is. But a concept of matter as elastic as Epicurus' could only lead to such contradictions.

If Epicurus' matter is peculiar, the gods are no less so. First of all, their only occupation consists of talking. Who knows what they talk about in an environment devoid of things and, consequently, with nothing much to discuss. Nevertheless, Epicurus guarantees that they certainly converse in Greek, not in the language of barbarians (which allows me to speak ill of them here without restraint, confident they won’t understand a word of what I’m saying). Being philosophers, according to Epicurus, they exchange ideas during the long interworld evenings, far from the miserable commotion of worlds and without interfering in the order or disorder of things. After all, they wouldn’t want to soil their delicate matter hands with the filth of denser matter, only to later ask Augustine to clean them.

Although they are indifferent to us and, therefore, useless, not caring about our prayers, even when uttered in their celestial language, Epicurus considers them the epitome of perfection. And as Epicurus also says that a god cannot be impotent, we must conclude that if they don’t help us, it is not because they cannot, but because they do not want to. However, according to Epicurus, a god who, being able to help the needy, refuses to do so, would be acting unworthy of their divine condition. Thus, Epicurus falls into the trap of his own argument, with which he believed he was destroying Greek religion and all possible religions: “Either God wants to help but cannot, or can but does not want to, or neither wants nor can.” Pessanha not only found this argument ingenious but also declared that it applies perfectly to the Christian God. However, not all of Augustine’s dialectics, combined with Perelman’s rhetoric, could free the Epicurean gods from this congenital dilemma that has plagued interworld debates for millennia: if they don’t interfere, and it is not because they cannot, and it is not because they don’t want to, then why on earth?

Epicurus says that we should fear and expect nothing from the gods since they remain in pure contemplative leisure and do not bring us any harm or good. However, on the other hand, he also states that pleasure is the supreme good, and the pursuit of pleasure is the cause and purpose of our actions, with the highest pleasure being contemplative leisure, embodied by the gods. Therefore, we should admire them. How is it possible that the supreme model of goodness does not bring us any good, that the object of admiration does not benefit the soul admiring it, nor provide any pleasure? These are questions that, for the sake of peace in the interworld, must be carefully avoided. But for us, who are already immersed in the dense earthly filth, let us continue with the investigation.

To determine if something influences another thing, the oldest and most effective method is to eliminate the first one (either in fact or imaginatively) and see how the second one fares. Epicurus says that the gods are harmless and indifferent. However, without them, what would become of Epicureanism? The pursuit of pleasure, lacking a model or ultimate goal to guide it, would eventually be lost in lesser pleasures, which Epicurus despises. Failing to achieve the benefit of contemplative leisure, it would result in an increase in suffering. According to Epicurus, this is precisely the outcome for those who seek pleasure in the earthly and immediate without knowledge of the supreme goal personified in the image of the gods. So, either the gods have a beneficial influence, even if solely by their mere presence,22 and are not as harmless as Epicurus claims, or, in the contrary hypothesis, they have no influence, and then the practice of Epicureanism is doomed to fail. Either Epicurus is right in theory and wrong in practice, or he is right in practice and wrong in theory—unless he is wrong in both aspects. We will explore this further later on.

For now, let us try to draw the logical consequences of the theory. If, on one hand, the gods are models of goodness, and, on the other hand, they are the image of the spiritual ideal guiding the efforts of the Epicurean ascetic, then they are not merely a cause of something but double causes: Aristotelian formal cause of goodness and final cause of ascetic life.

However, the philosophical pursuit of pleasure is just one special type of the general pursuit of pleasure, the goal and driving force of human life. Hence, the gods are not only the cause of the philosopher’s actions but also of those of all human beings. According to Epicurus, when people pursue gross pleasures, they obscurely and unconsciously seek the same supreme objective that, for the philosopher, has become conscious and embraced: contemplative leisure, personified in the gods. And since the desire for pleasure motivates not only humans but all beings and things—animals, plants, stones, atoms, galaxies—everything spinning in an ascending spiral from immediate and crude pleasures to the supreme ideal of contemplative leisure, we must admit that the Epicurean gods, in the end, are good for the entire universe. But if they are so remarkably good, why don’t they interfere once and for all to end evil in the world? At this point, the president of the interworld philosophical colloquium, seeing the debate heat up beyond the decorum that should reign in those exalted regions, interrupts the proceedings and calls for St. Augustine’s expert opinion…

§5 A pious subterfuge

The cosmology of Epicurus contradicts his ethics, and vice versa:23 if the world is as Epicurus describes it, one cannot be a successful Epicurean; and if the practice of Epicureanism is possible, then the world is not as Epicurus describes it.

This observation closes the path to a pious subterfuge that a devout disciple could still attempt to save something of Epicureanism; namely, the feeble excuse that Epicurean cosmology should not be taken literally, but interpreted symbolically. This excuse arises from the desire to see unfathomable depths where there is only the banality of confused thinking.

According to this hypothesis, Epicurus' cosmology would not aim to provide a literal description of the world as it really is, but merely a suggestive image that, although false in itself, would serve as a device to appease the human soul, freeing it from the fear of gods and predisposing it to follow the Epicurean path. Once this path is taken, the disciple would attain an “inner vision” that, in the end, would reveal the indescribable secret of the universe as it truly is. Under the guise of a false cosmology, Epicurus would have given us a true pedagogy, or rather, a psychagogy: a guidance of the soul. In this case, the aforementioned cosmology should not be critically judged but accepted in trust as the price of admission to the path of salvation. Moreover, the expressed doctrine we know as Epicurus' cosmology would not be the true cosmology of Epicurus but merely a fictitious portal for the use of novices – a veil of fantasy at the entrance to the temple of truth. Only the initiates would have access to the true cosmology, and once they reached the highest degrees of Epicurean asceticism, they could discard the veil of symbols to grasp, through direct intuition, the living truth incommunicable in words. Many people, not understanding anything of the master’s doctrine, must have decided to persevere in practicing his teachings driven by this hope or pretext; otherwise, Rajneesh, the Guru Maharaji, and Rev. Moon would not have a single disciple left. The letter of Epicurean doctrine would then not be there to be understood or philosophically discussed but to be accepted and “relived internally,” as in the ritual repetition of a myth.

It is possible that it is so, and in these times of shipwreck, whoever clings to Epicureanism as a last refuge is naturally free to believe so, amen. However:

1º: Accepting this hypothesis would exclude Epicureanism from the realm of philosophy and place it among religious or pseudo-religious beliefs.

2º: We cannot even consider it as a religious belief because any respectable religion clearly distinguishes between doctrine and method, and never imposes, in the name of any future benefits to be achieved by practicing the method, the preliminary acceptance of an inherently absurd doctrine that confuses the intellect and renders it incapable of following any method. The proof of a doctrine, whether philosophical, scientific, or religious, is always of an intellectual and logical order, and the value of a method is demonstrated by its practical results. But the practical results of a method never serve to retroactively validate a doctrine unless the connection between the method and the doctrine is already proven within the doctrine itself. Otherwise, any good result obtained through the practice of a method could be claimed as proof of any doctrine indifferently: the holiness of Buddha would demonstrate the validity of the doctrine of free enterprise, and the miracles of Christ would be evidence of vegetarianism. If this were extrapolated to extra-religious domains, the Beverly Hills diet would attest to the veracity of Marxism, and the successes of the franchising system would be an argument in favor of quantum physics. However, what we have seen in Epicureanism is precisely that there is no connection between theory and practice, so even fabulous practical results would not serve as evidence for the theory.

In such a case, only a perfect charlatan would resort, in the end, to the argument that this theory, too profound for mere logical intelligence to grasp, can only be understood by those who first practice the method without discussing it. For it would be an invitation for each person to engage more fervently in the practice the less they are capable of understanding the theory. In this case, perfect imbecility would become the highest proof of a disciple’s qualification for the spiritual path.24

3º: Even a symbolic cosmology, which presented itself as a mere imaginative preparation for asceticism, would have to meet an obvious requirement: it would have to be sensible or plausible – at least aesthetically plausible – enough to temporarily soothe the demand for explanations from an adult man. But Epicurus' cosmology is merely a poorly told story that may serve to lull children or old women to sleep, but in a man capable of judgment, it only arouses a feeling of incongruity, an abyssal vertigo, a sure sign that something is wrong. If, faced with this sign, the aspiring disciple, driven by the reverential fear inspired by the person of the master or by emotional blackmail from the mass of his fellow disciples, suppresses the inner demand for explanations and throws himself along with them into the abyss, then, evidently, nothing more needs to be said, except for the phone number of the nearest psychiatric hospital.

4º: If Epicurus' cosmology is not even valid as a symbolic preface to ascetic practice, then it is only valuable as a mirage to attract disciples to this practice. It is equivalent to an advertisement for Silva Mind Control. Its effectiveness depends on the disciple having relinquished all demand for truth and seeking only a fictitious relief for banal anxieties. Our cities are full of people like this, who do not realize the formidable psychological consequences they may face by following this easy path. It is to these people that Epicurus and José Américo Motta Pessanha’s appeal is directed.

§6 The imagination of the gods. Aevirternity

But do not think that this is the end of the philosophical problems that keep Epicurus' idle gods very busy. There is an even worse one.

If the gods speak, it is because they think. If they think, they have memory and imagination. And since everything that appears in memory and imagination has, according to Epicurus, material existence (though more rarefied than that of the body), it follows that the things the gods remember and imagine exist materially at that very moment. However, being these things more rarefied than the bodies of the gods who imagine them, Epicurus' equation that rarity equals durability forces us to admit that these things are more durable than the gods themselves. And if by chance a god had the disastrous idea of thinking about a cat or a lizard, these wretched mortals would, ipso facto, be endowed with greater durability than the gods.

The situation becomes even more catastrophic due to the fact that among the beings and things remembered by the gods, at least some are also thinking and therefore endowed with memory and imagination. For example, a god can think of a man who is thinking about a cat that is thinking about a lizard, and inexorably, this would form a hierarchy of increasing durability that would start from a provisional god and culminate in an eternal lizard, unless the lizard, in turn, did not think about mosquitoes.

If the idea itself is already quite uncomfortable, for a die-hard materialist like Epicurus or Pessanha, it must assume a sinister and diabolical aspect, once it is established that, in this hierarchy of remembering beings, the highest and most durable positions are occupied by the most rarefied beings, and the lowest positions by the densest beings. In other words, the more matter there is in a being, the lower it is in the ontological scale and the closer it is to pure and simple unreality. And this, to put it plainly, is genuine idealism.

One possible way out of the dilemma would be the concept of aeviternity or permanence. The gods, says Epicurus, are not eternal. They are mortal, but once dead, they are completely reconstituted as they were before. Not being confined to the limits of a determined existence, they might even perform the miracle of remembering, as a lived experience, events that happened before their birth or occurred after their death. They would only need to appeal to the memories of a previous or future life. Thus, they could become even more durable than lizards, since lizards do not have such rich memories.

But that would multiply the problem instead of solving it, as the beings remembered, in order to return to the gods' memory in each new existence, would need to be aeviternal themselves. And since each of these beings would also have their own personal memories, consisting in turn of even more durable beings, the whole thing would become terribly complicated.

There is still one intriguing detail. If the gods are reconstituted after each existence, it is because, from one life to another, they remain fundamentally identical to themselves. Thus, there is continuity of essence between the various existences, and an essence that remains unalterably the same despite change, time, and death would be nothing less than eternal. With this, besides falling back into the mortal sin of idealism, the most important difference between Epicurus' gods and those of Greek religion, or any other, would be completely revoked.

§7 Epicurus critic of Democritus

The reader may have already noticed that logical coherence is not Epicurus' strong suit. However, the philosopher of the garden was not ignorant of its necessity, nor did he scorn it, going so far as to demand it from his opponents. Yet, arguing on the basis of “do as I say, not as I do,” he often arrived at conclusions as or more outlandish than those he refuted. An example is his critique of Democritus, endorsed by Karl Marx and José Américo Motta Pessanha.

Democritus proclaimed that in the world there is only the void and, within it, the atoms; the void, not being material, offers no resistance, and therefore the atoms, propelled by an inexplicable initial push, fall and end up colliding with each other. Democritus' universe is a vast slide, where the main event is everything coming down.25 Epicurus responds that, if it were indeed so, all the atoms would fall straight and parallel;26 and, in the infinite void in all directions, they would never touch each other as Democritus intended, and therefore could not join together to form the beings and things that, nevertheless, exist.27

From this appeal to reason, Epicurus concludes that the initial impetus of the fall is not everything; that independently of it, and against it, atoms must also have a principle of free and undetermined movement, which he calls clinamen (“inclination”, “tendency”) and defines as the spontaneous impulse to seek pleasure and avoid pain. By the clinamen, atoms move randomly in all directions, at least partially subtracting themselves from the law of fall; and, coming into fortuitous contact with each other, they end up clustering into composite masses, forming beings and worlds.

All of this is of an atrocious naivety, for today’s mindset. We wonder if these people could distinguish an egg from a tomato, or complete a syllogism of the first figure. It turns out that Democritus, a contemporary of Plato, could not really be very good at logic, which had not yet been codified by Aristotle and was practiced empirically and amateurishly. But Epicurus already knew Aristotle’s work, and for this reason it is easier to forgive the naivety of Democritus’s cosmology than the inconsistency of his refutation. Democritus did not realize something that even a schoolboy would see at a glance today: that, in the indeterminate void, expressions like “falls” and “rises” make no sense28. Because these are precisely forms of determination. They presuppose beacons, a scale, a finite space referred to a center or at least the limitation to a determined field. But it is also false what Epicurus claims: that, in the void, all movements would have to be parallel and uniform; for indeterminacy excludes, by definition, all obligatory regularity. In the indeterminate, all movements would be indeterminate, without the need to introduce, for this, a new principle, and much less a principle as extravagant as the clinamen; atoms would move indeterminately in all directions, not because they wanted to do so moved by such or which Epicurean intentions, but simply because there would be nothing to determine the direction of movement. The void, once admitted, makes the clinamen perfectly unnecessary29.

The physics of Democritus and its refutation by Epicurus are both equally fallacious, but Pessanha condemned the former and endorsed the latter on the grounds that the former favors a “conservative” ethic and the latter a “progressive” ethic — an argument that is precisely what is scientifically called the last straw.

Pessanha saw conservatism in Democritus’s physics for the reason that the law of fall imposes integral determinism, leaving no other exit for the poor atoms but servile obedience to a tyrannical necessity; whereas, in Epicurus’s physics, there is room for the unexpected and free will. In fact, there is too much room, because there atoms, using and abusing their right to the clinamen, couple and uncouple at will in the most obscene cosmic debauchery, and they generate and destroy worlds and more worlds without giving the slightest satisfaction to beings, things, or gods.

A philosopher’s devoted interest in the political rights of atoms may seem somewhat bizarre, but even more inexplicable is that atoms should have the right to be free from the law of fall, while we, living beings, are inescapably subjected to the arbitrariness of atoms, without being able to utter a peep against their damned clinamen and only leaving us, in the face of it, the alternative of relax and enjoy that is offered to us by Epicureanism. All of this is, in fact, a very unique conception of freedom.

The association that Pessanha made between cosmology and politics is purely a figure of speech. Metaphorically, the revelry of atoms in the “liberou geral” of Epicurean cosmology may appear more progressive or democratic than the relentless submission to the law of gravity. However, it is only an appearance that can be interpreted in either direction. Several decades ago, didn’t a deterministic view of the inevitable fall of capitalism seem no more progressive to the communists than the liberal belief in the unpredictability of History? Didn’t theorists of liberal-capitalism precisely attack the deterministic Achilles' heel of Marxism? The use of images taken from physical science to support this or that political ideology only has rhetorical value, in the lowest sense of the expression. Accepting Epicurus' physics because it is progressive is the same as rejecting Einstein’s physics because he was Jewish.

But there’s another catch. Who said that seeking pleasure and avoiding pain frees us from determinism? Pavlov said exactly the opposite: the pain-pleasure binomial is the switch that triggers conditioned reflexes, through which an animal or a man can be governed from the outside. Buddhism says the same thing: that only those who go beyond pain and pleasure achieve freedom. Aristotle confirms this with the classic distinction, endorsed by Christianity, between free will and obedience to instinct. Dr. Freud also confirms it with his “reality principle” that transcends the pleasure principle. But we don’t need so much science to inform us what a cart driver knows perfectly well: that by making a donkey chase a pleasurable carrot and avoid a painful stick, we can take it wherever we want, without it having the slightest idea of being led from the outside or ceasing to believe that it exercises its “clinamen” freely. There’s no way out: if atoms follow the “clinamen,” they are not free; they obey the determinism of instinct, which is rigid and repetitive like the law of gravity.

Politically, then, the matter is quite obvious. Bismarck said that the science of government consists of “carrots and sticks.” The philosopher Alain, a theorist of the French Radical Party, made the condemnation of the “clinamen” famous in the name of freedom. He argued that people are docile and manipulable precisely because they seek pleasure and avoid pain; driven by sensations, they fall for the deception of appearances cleverly staged by the tyrant (remember football in the time of General Médici?). The conscious citizen, reacting against the deception, abstracts from the impressions of pleasure and pain and decides according to the relentless logic of physical order, which does not lie. Here, determinism becomes “progressive,” and the “clinamen” becomes an instrument of tyranny. Ironically, this argument is found in the book “Le Citoyen contre les Pouvoirs,” from which the organizers of the “Ética” event drew inspiration for naming one of its divisions: “The citizen against the powers.” That’s what happens when you quote without reading.

In the end, reaction and progressivism, dictatorship, and democracy can equally call upon Democritus or Epicurus, the law of gravity or the “clinamen,” with the same results: in the realm of political rhetoric, all arguments are rubbery.

Chapter 3 – Epicurus' Ethics

§8 The remedy for all ills

The ethical part of the Epicurean doctrine, which Pessanha pointed out as the solution to all the ills of humanity, especially of the Brazilian humanity, is not any less complicated than its cosmology.

Epicurus' ethics is divided into two parts: a general or theoretical part and another special or practical part. The theory consists merely of affirming some general values that coincide in gender, number, and degree with those subscribed by all philosophers of the time: the superiority of contemplation over action, philosophical life as a path to happiness, and so on. The worship of these values is common to Aristotle, Plato, the Stoics, the lesser Socratics, and has no reciprocal connection with Epicurus' cosmology or physics. It can be accepted within or outside of them indiscriminately. Thus, the same objection that Pessanha made to Democritus applies to Epicurus: that his physics and ethics have no connection, being valid only if we assume the hypothesis of a dual truth.

However, what is commonly referred to as "Epicurus' ethics" is the practical part or “Tetrapharmakon,” the “quadruple remedy” that the philosopher proposes for all human ills, and in which Pessanha suggested that the Brazilian people seek inspiration to escape moral misery.30

Yet, the “Tetrapharmakon” is by no means an ethics; it is merely a practical psychology, a technique for achieving happiness, or rather, what Epicurus understands as happiness. It is no more or less valuable than many techniques, mostly American, available today with the same goal. In a market saturated with similar methods like Dale Carnegie’s “Positive Thinking,” Schulz’s “Autogenic Training,” “Silva Mind Control,” Maxwell Maltz’s “Psycho-Cybernetics,” Caycedo’s “Sofrology,” Bandler and Grinder’s “Neurolinguistic Programming,” and an endless list of Eastern and pseudo-Eastern exercises that the New Age movement has spread from California to the world, the poor “Tetrapharmakon” can already consider itself defeated by the abundance of modern competitors.31

The “Tetrapharmakon” consists, in short, of a discipline, an inner gymnastics, where the practitioner, having fled from the agitation of the polis and well protected in the garden, gradually replaces the painful sensations of the present life with pleasant memories of the past until the past becomes present and the present disappears under the image of the past. Among the pleasant memories, the ones of philosophical conversations with friends in the peaceful garden stand out: the content of these conversations has a calming effect, teaching the disciple not to fear the gods (as they are out of the picture) or death (since those who cease to exist can no longer suffer) and so on. Words that console.

However, they only console when not examined closely, as a more careful scrutiny gives rise to some unsettling doubts, such as the following: if everything we imagine exists somewhere, then we must continue to exist after death, as friends, relatives, and enemies will remember us; and since everything imagined is material, the deceased must all be materially situated in some material world, interworld, superworld, or underworld. It is, therefore, with full logical inconsistency that Epicurus asserts the complete extinction of the human being after physical death; this assertion contradicts the fundamental principles of his cosmology.

But there are two other even more disturbing questions:

  1. Epicurus' cosmos is not a cosmos. It is chaos, where galaxies and amoebas, worlds and humans form and disappear by chance, at the whim of the fortuitous movements of atoms. In this world devoid of any predictable regularity, there is no possibility of making plans, and every action is condemned to failure in advance. Therefore, fleeing from pain, atoms, and humans only find more and more pain, and in seeking pleasure, they do not achieve a better outcome. The “clinamen” is presented as a free movement, but the exercise of this freedom clashes against the fatalism of pain, without escape; the “clinamen” is, in essence, a type of fatality, in an absolutely tragic universe where atoms and humans wander aimlessly from error to error and from suffering to suffering. And when, finally, abandoning the senseless pursuit of pleasures that cause more pain, humans find the path of philosophical meditation that should liberate them, this meditation leads them to the inescapable conclusion that the only possible relief is death, followed by total and eternal oblivion. Thus, the circle of fatality is closed, which, starting from the blind movements of atoms in the senseless void, reaches its purpose in the complete and definitive annihilation of man, before the indifferent gaze of the gods. The question is: how could this necrophilic philosophy, this macabre celebration of nothingness, pass as a message of consolation and attract thousands of unhappy people in search of relief to Epicurus' garden? What solace could they find in the garden, knowing that it is the entrance to the cemetery and that beyond the cemetery, there is only the larger cemetery of cosmic oblivion? What allure did they see in this promise worthy of Jim Jones?

  2. As seen, Epicurus' cosmology is such a mishmash of contradictions that a professional philosopher, familiar with the logic of Aristotle, could not help but perceive its inconsistency, which does not escape the attentive examination of a literate adult of average intelligence. The hypothesis that Epicurus was merely an incompetent, a charlatan, or an unconscious person seems unlikely. Could there be a second intention behind all this absurdity? Is there a method hidden behind Epicurus' nonsense? Could there be a fearsome secret concealed within this madness?

These questions remain unanswered in the theories of Epicureanism. Perhaps the answers lie in its practice.

§9 The abolition of conscience

The practice of the Tetrapharmakos immediately poses the following problem: if the objects that appear in the imagination always exist as they are, currently and materially, then the effort to see them increasingly clearly with the eyes of fantasy until they overlap with the impressions of the present must necessarily produce physical effects. To be consistent with Epicurus' physics, we must admit that these effects will not be confined to the body of the imagining individual, but will expand throughout the world, causing beings and things to materialize in the form of subtle bodies somewhere in the cosmos. Thus, the disciple, the more they advance in the practice of Epicurean meditation, the more they will be convinced that what they imagined exists or is coming into existence at this very moment and is even “more real” than the present sensible objects.

The same applies to memories: if produced with sufficient intensity, they will bring back past things, and these will enter the present life as an object that, thrown into a tank, makes space by pushing the water to the sides. The world of life, which for the common mortal is one, dense, and continuous, will become for the Epicurean meditator a punctured surface, and through these holes, the meditator can jump to the past or the future with the greatest ease and without the need for any time machine. And when they eventually remember that they used to remember something that they now no longer remember, it will be enough to open a hole in the hollow, or a hollow in the hole, for the forgotten thing not only to return to memory but to happen again in an even more realistic way than the first time; and so on, or backward, as you wish, in an endless mirage of times within times and gaps within gaps.

Presented this way, this Swiss cheese cosmology looks like The Terminator or Alice Through the Looking Glass. But the results of the game are serious. It happens that the distinction that the human brain makes between present sensations and those imagined is the one that, in logic, corresponds to the difference between the effective and the possible. Epicurus' chronological gymnastics, if practiced persistently, will eventually abolish in the disciple the intuition of this difference, leading them to believe in the effective, current reality of whatever they can imagine with enough clarity: contingent futures, mere logical possibilities only conceivable as abstract constructions, are then experienced as if they were objects of concrete experience. It is wishful thinking amplified, elevated to a system and rule of life. That a subject trained in this rule may come to admit as holy truths the most patent absurdities of Epicurean physics, is something that finally finds its explanation here: it is not the ethics of Epicurus that logically derives from its physics, but, on the contrary, the practice of its ethics is a prerequisite for someone to come to believe in its physics. It is a physics for the hypnotized.

It is worth examining the psychological side of this inversion, to see what kind of moral conduct can result from it. This will show what really consists of the ethics of Epicurus, behind all the fabric of pious allegations that serve as its packaging.

What we call the sense of the real is based on the distinction of the effective and the possible. We make this distinction by comparing what we think and imagine by our own will with the data imposed on us by the present situation. At this moment, for example, I type on the computer keyboard the words that spring from within me. They could be others, provided I wanted to change the focus of my attention to another subject. If I write these words and not others, I can assure, in the language that the cheeky people attributed to former President Jânio Quadros: I did it because I wanted to. But, as many times as I open my eyes, while sitting here, I will see in front of me the same keyboard and the same screen, which impose themselves on my vision as data from a world that I did not make and that comes ready to meet me. I can’t make my eyes see anything other than what is in front of them. I can’t swing them from here to Porto Alegre, to Machu Picchu or to Winesburg, Ohio, USA, as I swing in an instant the screen of thought and change words. My gaze is limited by what the world offers me, while my imagination knows no other limits than its own. This difference is what gives me the measure of reality: I admit as effective, as objectively existing, a world that resists me, that does not immediately bend to my arbitrariness with the plasticity of the imaginary. Existence is resistance, Dilthey used to say.

If my perception is limited to the place in space where I am, it is even more strongly tied to a certain moment in time. Space can still be partially overcome by moving the body, which, in another place, will see other things and not these. But time is invincible. What yesterday sensitized my retina, coming from outside, today can only be produced from within, re-produced in the imagination, and not without some effort. The delightful scenes of the past, experienced as a gratuitous gift of reality to our senses, can now only be re-lived as our own work, by an act of will that resolves to go in search of lost time with the reconstructive effort of a Proust. Similarly, what will happen tomorrow cannot now be perceived as a fact, but only conceived and projected from within, as hopeful or fearful conjecture. No matter how certain and fatal the future may be announced, an announcement will never have the massive presence of the accomplished fact; and depending on whether it is good or bad, it will always come accompanied by fear or desire — the possibility, in short — that things might turn out differently. The present, on the other hand, if it could have been different an instant ago, it cannot be now: it is fixed forever; having happened, it can no longer unhappen.

It is by learning the limits of my power — of what Kurt Levin called living space32 — that I come to distinguish the real from the unreal, the effective from the merely possible. Therefore, I understand that the distinction between the perceived fact and the imagined possibility is made by reference to the will, which is subject in one case, sovereign in the other. But I can only make this comparison if I clearly remember having thought or imagined such things on my own, from within, and if I assume authorship of these internal acts as I do of my material and external actions. It is only thus that I can grasp the difference between what springs from me and what comes from the world. The sense of the difference between the imagined and the perceived therefore rests on memory and responsibility. We become aware of objective reality, distinguishing it from our subjective projections, exactly by the same means and to the same extent that we become aware of ourselves as free subjects, active, creators of their actions as well as their intentions. The objectivity of knowledge is a function of moral freedom.

Now, our internal actions have no other witness but ourselves. Only I know by direct testimony my thoughts and intentions, which others can only conjecture by analogy. If I decide to lie about what is going on inside me, no one can stop me from doing so: not even those who, by external signs, perceive the falsity of the intention I claim will be able to prove by direct testimony what I hide. Sincere self-witness is the first and indispensable condition of objective knowledge.

But the desire to assume authorship of one’s internal acts — or even external ones — is not innate in man. With innocent ease, which in an adult would be cynicism, the child attributes responsibility for his deeds to a little brother, a classmate or imaginary beings, and only becomes aware that he is lying through the stern gaze of the father who brings him down from the heaven of imagination to pin him to the earthly ground where causes inevitably bind to consequences, and faults to punishments. Initially, the child accepts this limitation on account of the father’s authority, but later learns to establish for himself the connection between before and after, between intention and act, between authorship and guilt, and this is how self-awareness develops in him, which will be the basis not only of moral conduct, but of objectivity in knowledge. Truth is thus accepted as a moral value before it is established as a cognitive criterion.33 The admission of truth about oneself precedes the admission of truth about things. “Self-awareness is the homeland of truth,” Hegel said.

The possibility of objective knowledge therefore depends on a preliminary choice, in which man assumes — or does not assume — an inner commitment to truth and coherence. Nothing can force him into this commitment. The ease with which human beings get rid of it has always shocked philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle to Kant, Scheler, Ortega y Gasset, Éric Weil. Philosophers would like all men to be docile to the truth, but it is a utopian and self-contradictory aspiration: if the perception of truth is born of freedom, only he who is free to deny it can know the truth. “Known truth is obeyed truth,” Plato said; but even the known truth cannot be obeyed once and for all, by means of a preventive suicide of freedom, which guarantees us against the future temptations of error and lie. The choice for truth must be remade daily, amidst the hesitations and doubts that constitute the price of human dignity.

The commitment to truth, even if assumed wholeheartedly, never obliges the whole man: entire continents of the soul, like imagination or certain feelings, can continue wandering at the margin of any obligation to veracity, and responding only to immediate appetites. There are always many ways to escape from the truth. Dreams, for example, are a fabric of euphemisms that can serve to dampen or divert the impact of undesirable truths, helping to maintain the psychophysical organism in that state of absence of tensions that doctors call homeostasis. Of course, in a large number of cases, this opportunistic arrangement ends up producing a neurosis. The best definition of neurosis I know is from my late friend and master Juan Alfredo César Müller, a genius of clinical psychology. Neurosis, he said, is a forgotten lie that you still believe. If lying to oneself is forgetting the truth, neurosis is forgetting the forgetting, erasing the traces of the trick. In neurosis, the lie becomes a system, a program that self-multiplies, hiding the initial lie under mountains of debris only for someone later to have to pay a psychoanalyst to remove them. But no one would become neurotic if the neurotic option did not seem advantageous to him, at least at the decisive moment when an intolerable truth opens up before him like an abyss. Lying relieves because it saves the psyche the effort of bearing a temporary imbalance.

This means, in sum, that there is no moral consciousness or objective knowledge without some voluntary psychic suffering, without at least a temporary sacrifice of inner harmony in view of values that transcend the immediate interests of the psychophysical organism. “To be objective, Frithjof Schuon used to say, is to die a little”. Objectivity is sincerity projected outward, just as sincerity is the introjection of objective limits. Sincerity and objectivity, in turn, form an indissoluble connection with responsibility: the three conditions that make up moral self-consciousness. 34

Once the demands of self-consciousness are slackened, however, imagination becomes the dutiful servant of immediate organic interest, producing as many fictions as are necessary to preserve the individual in a state of profound moral slumber, in which they do not have to answer for their actions. The numbing of consciousness has degrees and stages, ranging from the everyday “rationalizations” with which we evade the appeal of small duties in daily life, to complete inversion. The morally blunted man can no longer “feel” the intrinsic goodness or evil of his actions. Although he knows perfectly well the social norms that approve or disapprove of certain behaviors, he sees them only as mechanical conventions, and he may even continue to obey them externally out of sheer habit, but without even thinking of adhering to them wholeheartedly; and he will continue like this until the conjunction of necessity with opportunity transforms him once and for all into the criminal he always was. Albert Camus gives in The Stranger the portrait of the type whose peaceful mediocrity hides the most absolute moral insensitivity. One day the subject walks on the beach and, without any reason, even without feeling anger, decides to shoot two passers-by. Until the end, he does not understand the revolt and indignation that his crime arouses. As human intelligence does not operate in a vacuum, but only elaborates and transforms the data it receives from the sensitive sphere, it is natural that, when a man no longer feels the reality of something, the concept of that thing, the scheme that corresponds to it in the plan of abstract intelligence, soon begins to seem empty of meaning to him too. At such times, only a true philosopher will think of becoming aware of his inner impoverishment and go in search of the lost feeling, to give new life to the concept. The majority will simply adapt the concept to the current state of their soul. In the man without major moral interests, the emptied concept has no more function and will simply be forgotten. But if this man is a scholar, he will not bear to be the only one to feel as he feels. Invariably, he will create arguments to demonstrate that what he does not feel does not exist in the objective world. His inability to discern good from evil except as empty conventions will be used as “proof” that all moral law is an empty convention, and the deformity of his psyche will be erected as a moral yardstick for all humanity. But a man does not live for long in a state of moral abstinence. After having undermined the bases of every objective moral criterion, he will continue to have hatreds and affections, repugnancies and desires, which, in the intellectual sphere, will sprout many corresponding moral judgments rationally elaborated. Unable to endure indefinitely the insecurity of admitting that these judgments are mere subjective preferences, no better or worse than any others, he will fall into the temptation to argue in favor of them, to give them an intellectual expression and foundation; and, in doing so, he will create a new criterion of morality, which will consist of nothing other than the universalizing amplification of the perverse tastes of an individual. The abstract language of moral philosophy will have become a weapon in the service of selfish ends, of an inflated ego that will reshape the world in its own image and likeness.

The subjective aspirations of individuals, however, are not so different from each other, especially in the era of mass culture that standardizes the desires of the crowd, and for this reason the improvised moral philosopher will soon have the pleasant surprise of discovering that his ideas are shared by millions of people just like him, many of whom had been producing, with the same ends, many other coincident moral philosophies. There he will find the decisive argument in favor of his system: the argument of number. His personal system of rationalizations will be ennobled and invested with universal validity as the expression of “the aspirations of our time.”

But as the desires of the crowd, molded by mass culture, all condense in the golden triangle sex-money-fame, the new ethics born of moral bluntness will consist of nothing more than a system of rationalizations that will transform these three desires into hypostases of universal moral values and the ultimate foundations of all ethically valid conduct. Thus the inversion is complete: the lowest and most vulgar passions have risen to the status of divine commandments, the violation of which subjects man to internal sufferings, if not public execration or legal penalties.

The complete dulling of moral intuition, replaced by a sophistic rhetoric of hallucinatory artificiality, was diagnosed by Konrad Lorenz as a form of biological degeneration, which, by erasing from human memory records of values learned throughout animal evolution, heralds the beginning of the demolition of the human species.35

But probing the prime causes of this phenomenon, on a human scale, is not my intent. What I want to ask is how it happens in a particular individual. I exclude, of course, cases of congenital psychopathy, which are technically referred to as psychopathic personalities or sociopaths. It is not possible that the entire set of radical activists in the world is composed of a majority of psychopathic personalities, affected by congenital perversions. What intrigues me is: how can a man of normal personality be transformed in such a way that his moral sense becomes identical to that of a born sociopath? How can moral perversity be artificially inoculated? For it is obvious that, if this possibility did not exist, certain social and political movements could only recruit their followers from psychiatric hospitals and would never pass beyond being clubs of eccentrics. When today we see hordes of activist intellectuals fighting for abortion to become an inviolable right, for manifestations of antipathy to any sexual perversion to be punished as crimes, for parental interference in the sexual education of young people to be limited to instruction on the use of condoms, for the Church to bless the practice of sodomy and punish those who speak against it, we must admit that something, acting on these people, has destroyed their elementary moral intuition; that, as Lorenz would say, some external interference has erased from their brains the records of moral experience accumulated throughout biological evolution.36

If this something is neither heredity nor that fortuitous conjunction of traumatic circumstances that can produce a psychopathic personality, then it can only be a premeditated human action. Premeditated human action, carried out according to a rational connection of causes and effects, is what is called a technique. This technique exists. In fact, there are many. There is not a single mass movement in this world, not a single nation-state, not a single large corporation that does not have a technique, or a set of techniques, for shaping the personality of its members in accordance with the organization’s ends. With alarming frequency, this molding involves more or less dulling of moral sense and intellectual conscience.

There is perhaps no field of research in the world into which governments, political parties, religious and pseudo-religious organizations, corporations, and unions have invested more than in the means of subjugating the human mind. The list of techniques that the 20th century conceived for this purpose is enviable to scientists from other fields: conditioned reflexes, brainwashing, psychological warfare, subliminal influence, control of the imaginary, behavioral engineering, directed information, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, instant hypnosis, stimulation by pheromones, the list is endless. The man tamer today has at his disposal an arsenal of resources vaster and more effective than that of technicians in any other field of activity.

These pieces of knowledge are not stored in archives and libraries for consultation by rare researchers and the curious: they are all being used in practice, in many countries around the world, for the most varied purposes. There is no political dispute, advertising campaign, ideological or religious propaganda that does not make extensive use of them, subjecting the human mind to a stupefying bombardment that makes normal exercise of discernment impossible and predisposes the masses to a new pathology that has received the very pertinent designation of information psychosis.37

The thing that most impresses the student of the subject is the omnipresence of mind manipulation in contemporary life. Without it, the great mass movements that mark the history of the century simply could not have existed. It is impossible to imagine what would have become of communist propaganda without conditioned reflexes and without the brainwashing invented by the Chinese;38 what would have become of fascism and Nazism without the technique of contradictory stimulation with which these movements disorganized civil society;39 how the two world conflicts and dozens of local conflicts and revolutions would have unfolded without the massive use of psychological warfare;40 what would have become of Western governments and large capitalist enterprises without the control of the imaginary and the “behavior modification” they exercise over populations that have no suspicion of this;41 what would have happened to esoteric and pseudo-esoteric organizations and the New Age movement without the techniques of instant hypnosis and subconscious communication with which they reduce their millions of disciples worldwide to mental slavery; what would have been the fate of the mass communications industry without the use of subliminal influence by which they reduce the young public of all countries to the most idiotic passivity.

If we were to finally remove from the historical panorama of the 20th century the techniques of mind manipulation, nothing could have happened as it did. They were certainly more decisive in the making of contemporary history than all other techniques conceived in all other domains, including the atomic bomb and computers. They are among the primary causes of historical happenings in our time, and yet historians continue to ignore them. They know, of course, the importance of “technique” among the causes of historical becoming; but, trapped in a crude and object-like notion of what a technique is, they conceive under this name only that which materializes into some kind of device or machine, or at least in a more or less patent action scheme. The few who were interested in the realm of the mind were diverted in their efforts by a prejudicedly selective vision, which only highlighted some forms of domination at the expense of concealing others, greater and worse. 42 When, however, the history of the research and use of mind manipulation techniques in the 20th century is written with sufficient overview, then it will be seen that no other phenomenon defines and characterizes it as well as this. More than the century of ideologies, more than the century of atomic physics, more than the century of information technology, this was the century of mental enslavement.

Now, would it be conceivable that populations constantly subjected to this psychological massacre could keep intact for a long time the intuitive and evaluative faculties whose loss Lorenz sees as the beginning of the demolition of the human species? Is it not rather more likely that humanity thus manipulated, dazed, deceived twenty-four hours a day ends up entering a chronic state of self-deception? One of the few historians who took this tragically serious phenomenon seriously denounced, in 1969, “the advent of a political system based on imposture to a much greater degree than all those that have existed up to this point”. 43 With the proverbial delay that marks the pronouncements of the Catholic Church, Pope John Paul II finally recognized in 1994 that, under the appearances of continuity of what humanity called civilization, a kind of anti-civilization, the civilization of the Antichrist, is growing today all over the world. In this new panorama, all the most frankly erroneous, morbid, deformed, and failed ideas and conceptions that previous centuries and millennia rejected come out from the bottom of the trash of oblivion to constitute the pillars of a universal cult of deception.

It is in this context that the call for the revival of Epicureanism must be understood.

Chapter 4 – Epicurus' Logic

§10 Smoke and fire

“The divide between Socrates and Protagoras remains intact. The conceptus and imago, remember? For the former, self-knowledge is what matters; for the latter, it’s discourse, presentation, beauty, and pomp. It’s clear that the latter still dominates, but for how much longer?” – FRANÇOISE HUET44

The psychological practices I mentioned in the previous paragraph, infinitely varied in their language and pretexts, sometimes “scientific”, sometimes “mystic”, which they use to justify themselves, have one thing in common. They are all forms and variants of the same technique: hypnosis.

In the hypnotized man, most psychic functions continue to operate normally. He speaks, reasons, recalls and feels as if he were awake. Only one function is suspended: the reflexive judgment that, returning on the contents of representation, judges them as effective or possible, true or false, likely or unlikely, probable or improbable. In other words: the hypnotized knows how to distinguish between images, but does not know how to judge the cognitive value of images. Having before his retina the figure of a cow, he knows how to distinguish it from a pig; but he does not know whether he saw a cow or imagined a cow. When he hears from the hypnotist the order: “Take a glass of water”, he understands the meaning of the order, but interprets it as if it were a desire sprung from within. The deeper the hypnotic trance, the more difficult it becomes to judge cognitive value, until complete depersonalization is reached. There the mere verbal suggestion of a lit cigarette will be enough to produce real burns on the hypnotized man’s hand: the skin cells react to verbal stimulation as they would to the heat of an ember.

The Tetrapharmakos is, beyond any doubt, a hypnotic method, in which the practitioner, through exercises, progressively depresses his sense of time, learns to trust more in imaginary visualization than in reflexive judgment, systematically takes mere possibility as effective reality, and finally, is ready to believe in all the absurdities of Epicurus' physics as soon as he can see them on the screen of fantasy, repressing the requirement to confront them with each other to form a coherent and hierarchical global conception like the one that guides us in waking life.

This is how we can explain why Epicurus' physical conceptions, so manifestly unsustainable, could have been accepted by a multitude of credulous disciples. This is also how we can understand how these disciples did not realize that Epicureanism, in the final analysis, offered them nothing but an apology for death. For, diverted into the endless meanders of imaginative fantasy, they never reached the final analysis.

But Epicurus did not limit himself to practicing and teaching the discipline of illusion: he even developed a whole logical system to sustain it. The logic of signs or logic of appearances, which Epicurus opposes to the logic of concepts (which he knew through Aristotle), systematizes reasoning of the type “where there’s smoke, there’s fire”, making them the supreme criterion of knowledge. Such reasoning, which traditional and modern logic calls abductive, is abundantly used in daily life, but any beginner in philosophy knows that their value is only rhetorical and persuasive. They serve to exemplify and communicate ideas, not to prove them. The very fact that Epicurus used them to support the theories of his hallucinated physics is a sign that they are a bonne à tout faire, with the help of which one can literally prove anything, for example that the year 1991 lasted only one month or that the holes in a Swiss cheese weigh 3 kg. In the hands of a skilled technician, the logic of signs can very well give pure metaphysical veracity to the impressions of a hypnotized subject, demonstrating that, if a burn appeared on the hand, it was certainly touched by a cigarette ember, for if smoke proves the presence of fire, how much more would a live burn prove it!

But it does not take much effort to prove that Epicurus' logic is not aimed at the search for truth, but only at the production of fictitious consolations; for it is Epicurus himself who declares it: “To escape knowledge— he recommended to a disciple —, raise the sails as quickly as possible”.45 True to this principle, he claimed that the truth of explanations is indifferent: what matters is their calming effect. More precisely: any explanation is good, as long as it, by warding off the hypothesis of a divine cause, quenches the fear or hope of a future life. We can even accept simultaneously several contradictory explanations, if this in some way reassures us, reducing the mysteries of the universe to the proportion of our most mundane experience.46 The intentional dulling of intelligence, the banalizing reduction of the totality of reality to the scale of immediate sensations like itching or gurgling, is the essence of a logic which lacks, in compensation for its timid investigative power, a marked soporific virtue.

Pessanha praised Epicurus' logic a lot, but did not clarify that it is only rhetoric, did not explain the differences between logic and rhetoric, and much less declared the hidden premise of all his discourse: the premise according to which the important thing is to persuade, and not to prove. A syllogism with a hidden premise is called, in rhetoric, an enthymeme. The skill with which Pessanha handled this and other enthymemes in his MASP lecture showed that, an ardent disciple of Epicurus, he was also a diligent student of Perelman. But he also did not say what Perelman, if alive and present there, would think of all this. I do not know either. But I know that Perelman, in his classic Treatise on Argumentation, mentions Epicurus only once, and as the author of a self-defeating argument. In rhetoric, this is an argument that turns against the very person of its author, such as in the case of a Jew defending Nazism. In the cited passage, the man from the garden supports the thesis according to which parents should abandon their children. Perelman then reproduces the argument that the Stoic philosopher Epictetus opposed to this: “If your father and mother knew that you would say these things, they would certainly have abandoned you”.47

If Perelman knew to what ends his teachings would eventually be used, he would have refused to teach rhetoric to José Américo Motta Pessanha.

§11 The invitation to sleep

It is true that modern techniques of manipulating the psyche make the Tetrapharmakon look weak. Pessanha alluded to one of these techniques when he said that “some modern psychotherapists” see nothing else to be done for the suffering man than to induce him to represent his sufferings in images, and then, by improving the images, alleviate the suffering. In other words, they have discovered that wishful thinking works; that, ultimately, Epicurus was right.

What technique is this? Pessanha did not give it a name, but it is Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), popularized in recent years by books like Anthony Robbins' Unlimited Power,48 and, in Brazil, by the works of Lair Ribeiro. It has similarities and differences with the Tetrapharmakon, but if it could serve Pessanha as a confirmation of Epicurean theses, it was certainly based on an underlying argument that, stated explicitly, would read as follows: “In a chaotic and meaningless world, where the only destiny that awaits us is complete extinction and eternal oblivion, there is nothing left to do but try to imagine things better than they are. The effectiveness of NLP confirms Epicurus.”

If this argument were made explicit, it would do nothing more than demoralize Epicurus and NLP in one fell swoop. For if NLP confirms Epicurus and Epicurus anticipates NLP, there is a connection between them from premise to conclusion, from theory to practice: Epicureanism emerges as the theoretical root of NLP, and NLP as the materialized fruit of Epicureanism. However, we have already seen the value of Epicureanism as the theoretical foundation of anything. If NLP can, in practical terms, show Epicureanism in a better light, that is what we will see.

NLP emerged from the clinical practice of one of the great psychotherapists of the century: Milton Erickson. Paralyzed, Erickson developed, perhaps as compensation, an extraordinary sensory acuity that allowed him to perceive subtle changes in tone of voice, body temperature, muscle tone, and gaze direction in people around him. Interpreting these spontaneous signals, he could communicate with his patients on a level that went far beyond explicit verbal content, and thus achieve spectacular results with patients who had been given up on by other psychotherapists, particularly with schizoid types with poor verbal communication.

Erickson was a clinician, a practical type; he never wrote a book or sought to systematize his discoveries. This work was done by two researchers, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, who were investigating the psychology of communication when they encountered the Erickson phenomenon. It was enough to observe him in action to realize that verbal communication, far from being an autonomous whole, relied on a complex network of non-verbal signals, without which speech proved powerless to reach the depths of a person’s being. However, in daily life, these signals, deeply ingrained in the habits and conventions of human communication, remained implicit and ultimately became entirely automated and unconscious in practice. They were always there, helping or hindering conversation, but no one paid attention to their presence. Erickson realized that the success or failure of personal communication depended on them; by using them, he managed to break through the barrier of incommunicability, opening up the most beautiful hopes of healing in psychotherapy for cases deemed insoluble.

Bandler and Grinder recorded hundreds of psychotherapy sessions with Erickson (as well as with two other psychological clinic wizards, Gregory Bateson and Virginia Satir); with the help of a computer, they coded all the signals, systematized the technique of non-verbal communication, and, naming it NLP, turned it into a marketable product. But they did not restrict themselves to a audience of psychotherapists. They ventured into new markets: selling the technique to executives who intended to persuade their bosses to give them undeserved raises, to salespeople eager to get rid of stagnant inventory, to lawyers wishing to persuade judges to sign unjust sentences, to politicians determined to deceive their constituents, to husbands interested in deceiving their wives, and so on. Bandler and Grinder made a fortune by exploiting Erickson’s discoveries, which were transformed into a recipe for psychological Machiavellianism for popular use. But Erickson, who had already passed away at that time, could not send any verbal or non-verbal signals of just indignation from the other side.

In the United States, it became a national passion. An American magazine called NLP “the new pop psychological craze.” Thousands of training centers spread from coast to coast—and soon, the technique of subliminally inducing through non-verbal signals became a common means of communication in many companies, clubs, political associations, churches, and households.

The neuro-linguistic programmer does not waste time with arguments. They act directly on the customer’s subconscious, subtly introducing almost imperceptible messages into any conversation. The victim, believing that they are expressing their spontaneous feelings, is gradually led to feel what the programmer wants them to feel, to do what the programmer wants them to do, just like the donkey chasing the carrot, completely persuaded that they are freely exercising their clinamen.

The reader should not think that they are facing another magical potion, another harmless charlatanism. NLP works. Hundreds of tests conducted at American universities, with the strictest scientific control, have shown this. The non-verbal communication patterns it utilizes are real, and their use is perfectly effective. But that is precisely the problem. As the magazine Science Digest warned as early as 1983: "Once on the market, the technique of NLP threatens to become a formidable tool for personal manipulation and, in the wrong hands, a dangerous instrument of social control."49

Wrong hands? In the United States, as the same magazine reported, NLP was already being used everywhere at that time to make people sell their possessions at a low price, to persuade judges to acquit the guilty and convict the innocent, to make voters vote against their own interests, to make investors burn their capital in ostensibly unviable businesses, and so on. Skillful use of non-verbal signals allows for gaps in conscious attention, imperceptibly altering the course of reasoning, leading a person to do what they believe is wrong, to buy what they do not want, to approve what repulses them. After a few hours, the victim may realize the folly, but by then it is too late: a word, a signature, may have caused irreversible consequences. This disproves the comforting myth that no hypnosis or subliminal manipulation can induce a person to do something against their convictions; a myth that, on the one hand, greatly favors the hypnotist’s actions, leading the victim to not guard against a risk they believe does not exist, and on the other hand, omits the detail that precisely all subliminal influence consists of abolishing the dominion of will, severing the ties between the individual psyche and its moral frames of reference, without which the ego cannot take a position, judge, decide, want or not want: with the capacity for judgment and decision neutralized, a person is at the mercy of what is suggested to them and ready to justify the decision imposed upon them, assuming it as their own to restore the illusory integrity of their self-image; and thus, they assume guilt for the harm done to them.

The widespread use of these techniques risks undermining the entire field of human coexistence, legitimizing subliminal manipulation as a normal and common form of how each person deals with others, and subverting all standards of sincerity, honesty, and solidarity. If this custom becomes universal, the entire society will be at the mercy of a horde of psychological manipulators, eager for unlimited power and armed with a formidable arsenal of means to defraud and place other people at their service. As these neo-Machiavellians unite to dominate the rest of the population or engage in fierce competition with each other, we will have either the most perfect and indestructible tyranny or generalized anarchy, universal scoundrelry.

Pointing out the danger, Science Digest also reported a wave of protests and warnings against NLP coming from the press, academic circles, educators, and health professionals. That was ten years ago. But it was in the United States. Americans—despite a certain recent numbness, which I will address in the final chapters of this book—generally know how to protect themselves against anything that seems to suppress hard-won freedoms. In Brazil, NLP has been gaining ground since then, with great boldness and applause, without anyone raising the slightest suspicion against it, without anyone even suggesting the possibility that there might be something wrong with it. Brazilians are absorbing NLP with the naive fascination of a child who feels very flattered to be admitted for the first time into a circle of cocaine addicts. No one escapes the charms of the new technique. Those who consider themselves mystics see in it a gateway to supreme mysteries. Those who boast of solid bread-and-butter materialism see it as an instrument of power and social advancement. Neurotics ask for a quick means of relief, and psychotherapists seek a quick recipe for spectacular cures. Everyone trusts that they only have something to gain, and when they gain nothing, it doesn’t matter: NLP has means of making the loss a gratifying experience. If someone vaguely perceives that they are being manipulated behind their back, all the better: it confirms the effectiveness of the new technique, adds more shine to its fascination, and incites the victim to continue the experience, either by attraction to the abyss or by the ambition to acquire, in turn, the power to manipulate others.

Even those who dislike the proposal show no sign of perceiving any danger in it. When it is not received as a saving message, it is ignored as harmless charlatanism. Thus, protected by the gullibility of believers and the blasé indifference of skeptics, NLP is entering, gaining strength, invading all sectors of public and private activity, and injecting there, in increasing doses, the virus of subliminal manipulation.

A people’s inability to perceive the dangers threatening them is one of the strongest signs of the self-destructive depression that heralds major social defeats. Apathy, indifference to one’s own destiny, the concentration of attention on secondary matters accompanied by total neglect of essential and urgent issues, all indicate the torpor of a victim who, foreseeing a blow stronger than they can bear, prepares, through an anesthetic reflex, to surrender helpless and half-unconscious into the hands of the executioner, like a sheep offering its neck to the blade.

But when torpor invades not only the soul of the people but also the minds of intellectuals, and the voice of the best no longer rises except to join in the hypnotic refrain, then the last hope of a reawakening of consciousness fades away. “Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.” When, in a course of “Ethics” ostensibly devoted to national salvation objectives, eminent intellectuals offer the Tetrapharmakon and NLP as miraculous solutions instead of condemning them as unethical and warning against their use, then public consciousness has already moved beyond the first stage of sleep, mere drowsiness, to fall headlong into the sphere of dreams, from which it will only emerge to sink into the third stage: deep sleep, without dreams. Complete oblivion.

§12 Voluntary servitude

I am not exaggerating the danger. A philosopher should be the first to warn against it, instead of falling into the trap of its seduction and leading the people to plunge into it as well.

The warning, it’s true, would likely fall on deaf ears. The techniques of psychological manipulation have progressed so much in recent decades, in scope, precision, and efficiency, that they have surpassed what the average person can accept as plausible. And indeed, they don’t accept it: almost everyone stubbornly refuses to listen to anything concerning this matter. On the other hand, as governments, secret services, pseudo-mystical sects, and multinational companies invest ever-increasing amounts in researching these subjects, the result is that the dominion of means to enslave the minds of the people grows in inverse proportion to their means of defense. And there, one no longer knows who is more to blame: the seducer who enslaves or the seduced who surrenders, delighting in masochism, to voluntary servitude.

A significant example was that, after the worldwide success of the novel Brave New World (1932), Aldous Huxley could not manage to gather more than a meager audience for his book Brave New World Revisited in the 1970s. The first of these works was science fiction, envisioning the advent of a robotized social order where humans would be reduced to slavery through hypnotic techniques. The second book was not fiction but a report: it provided irrefutable evidence that the techniques outlined in the previous book were already prepared and on the verge of being applied for political purposes. In short, humanity already had one foot inside the Brave New World.

Why is the public, so sensitive to the sinister predictions of fiction, indifferent to the warning that fiction has become reality?

One possible answer is that the warning itself is stupefying. Faced with certain news, it is easier to be overcome by panic than to reason, and panic quickly turns into stupor, a catatonic insensitivity that protects against further shocks. Affected indifference is a self-defense reaction against panic—and who would flee from panic if they were not already in a state of panic?

A second reason is that, at least apparently, there is an intolerable contradiction in asking consciousness to recognize its subjection to an unconscious power. To acknowledge that one is asleep, a person must be at least half-awake; the primacy of the unconscious can only be affirmed by a conscious person; and only those who have escaped manipulation know they are being manipulated. It is one of the oldest and most uncomfortable paradoxes of the human mind. We can escape it, for example, with the help of Aristotelian distinctions between potentiality and actuality, substance and accident: in an essential sense, consciousness rightfully dominates; in actual existence, it has ups and downs and only maintains its dominion by struggling against unconsciousness. But most people do not grasp these subtleties and can only escape the paradox by the disastrous expedient of denying the facts. The more we fear a danger, the more we tend to feign a superior indifference towards it: “Sit down, the lion is tame.”

This is not the place to describe in detail the techniques of psyche manipulation. However, among the multitude of examples of their peril, I will choose just one so that the reader, if they still harbor any remnants of false security, may dispel them and seek true security, which lies in understanding the subject. Epicurus, forgive me this detour, which I guarantee will not be useless: when we return to your garden, it will be with a full awareness of what is planted in it.

The newspaper O Estado de São Paulo, in a dispatch by its correspondent Marielza Augelli squeezed into a corner of the page,50 reported some time ago the strangest wave of crimes ever seen in Italy. It was a new type of robbery, in which the criminals did not use weapons, white or firearm, but rather… hypnosis. A form of instantaneous and practically irresistible hypnosis. The victim, a shop or bank cashier, fell into a nebulous torpor and handed over to the thieves, one by one, all the banknotes, meticulously and without any resistance. Ten minutes later, by realizing what had been done, it was too late. The Italian police recorded, in six months, more than a hundred of these crimes.

The spectacular feats of the hipnoladri, as the Italian press dubbed them, became even more unsettling due to three peculiarities:

First. The victims, ashamed and confused, ended up attributing the blame for the acts committed under hypnotic suggestion to themselves. It is the paradox I mentioned: assuming non-existent moral guilt seems less painful than accepting the humiliating hypothesis of a discontinuity of consciousness. Similar reactions appear in all kinds of hypnosis. For example, the hypnotist orders the subject to, after awakening, open and close a drawer three times; he obeys and, if asked why he acted that way, offers a complete and personalized justification.

Second. For this very reason, many victims refrained from filing a complaint (just like raped women). This led the Italian police to believe that the total number of recorded occurrences, already alarming, was far less than the actual number of crimes.

Third. Proving authorship was technically impossible, except in the case of red-handedness, which in turn was very unlikely. The courts and the police, inexperienced in dealing with the case, were flustered.

For now, nothing can be done to prevent these crimes from proliferating and spreading to other countries, spreading insecurity and confusion; nor to prevent the techniques of the hipnoladri, once proven and approved by gangs of thieves, from being later used for purposes of political domination.

But these weapons were not only tested in a few dozen assaults. Other organizations, perhaps more dangerous than gangs of robbers, have been employing them on a global scale, to reduce millions of people to psychological slavery. I am referring to pseudo-mystical sects of the Moon, Rajneesh, “Children of God” type, as well as to the discreet if not secret entities that found and direct them.

No matter how much antipathy they arouse, these organizations continue to operate with the greatest ease in all countries, under the totemic shadow of “religious freedom”, although everyone knows that they promote slavery.

The only country that opposed an effective barrier to the advance of sects was France. In May 1985, the French Parliament approved a law proposed by the Socialist Party, which allows the victims' relatives to remove them from the clutches of their gurus with the help of the police, even when they are of age, and force them into psychiatric treatment.

In the United States, private entities are committed to facilitating by all means the liberation of people mentally imprisoned by sects, and direct them to specialized clinics. In 1988, the West Coast – the largest concentration of gurus per capita in the American territory – already had more than a hundred therapy clinics for sects' ex-members. But any official action is blocked by the logical aporia embedded in the 5th Amendment to the Constitution: the lay State cannot define what is religion and what is not; therefore, it can only accept as such everything that declares itself as such. It is a free-for-all, where democracy becomes the pretext for tyranny (we will see at the end of this book the true scope of this phenomenon). Anyway, the public is aware of the problem, the debates continue and sooner or later a legally valid means of solving the case may be discovered.

In Brazil – need I say? – the subject is not even discussed. Sporadic denunciations, made by ex-members or by victims' relatives, quickly fall into oblivion. The press only drops its usual indifference to exploit, when it can, the spectacular side – which gives the case a ghostly, hypnotic air, and prevents the public from seriously considering the problem. Doctors and psychologists fall into two categories: those of a mystical inclination are generally more or less involved with some sect or guru, and the tough materialists affect disdain for the subject to the same extent that, confusing spirit and psyche, witchcraft and mysticism, they fear to encounter, in the investigation of the case, some unexplainable phenomenon that shakes their beliefs, both simplistic and pedantic. As for educators, well, do you know any?

By a tragic irony, Brazil is, according to a scholar on the subject (he is not Brazilian), the second world record holder in the number of sects. The first is India, the wounded civilization that V. S. Naipaul spoke of, where the long and painful decomposition of traditional society, undermined by the infiltration of the West, opens the flank to all the degenerations of the religious spirit.

§13 From Pavlov’s dogs to the brain wash

The subject is fertile ground for misunderstandings. When someone talks about the psychological slavery that some sects impose on their disciples, the words “brainwashing” quickly come to the interlocutor’s lips. It’s a half-truth. The techniques used by these sects originated from brainwashing, but they only share the same goal, which they achieve through different and more effective means.

The term “brainwashing” entered popular language from the “Moscow trials” in the 1930s, where loyal Communists appeared confessing the most implausible crimes they allegedly committed against the regime. The Western press suggested that the use of some unusual psychological means was responsible for these “conversions,” turning revolutionary heroes into bewildered clowns confessing to fictional crimes.

In 1940, Arthur Koestler’s novel, “Darkness at Noon,” vividly portrayed the psychological torture processes that led Soviet prisoners to lose their identities.

Soon, it became evident to everyone that brainwashing was an application of the theories of Russian neurophysiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), the discoverer of conditioned reflexes produced through stimulus-response conditioning. The idea of shaping human behavior through planned application of punishments and rewards was an extension of Pavlov’s findings, and a significant part of the “reeducation” received by Soviet prisoners was simply that.

However, indoctrination would yield limited results if not for Pavlov’s second discovery: that of “incoherent stimulation.” He studied this in dogs. Initially programming them to salivate at the sight of a red light, which signaled the offering of a steak, Pavlov then alternated showing the steak with the light off and the light without the steak. The dogs became completely bewildered. Breaking the chains of conditioned reflexes, their brains went haywire. The most surprising aspect was how the dogs adapted to the new situation: “The prolonged inhibition of acquired reflexes,” Pavlov wrote, “evokes intolerable anguish, from which the subject frees himself by reacting in opposition to his usual conduct. A dog will become attached to the laboratory worker he disliked and will try to attack the owner he used to like.”

Therefore, the prisoners' change in attitude was not determined by the political content of the indoctrination but by the accumulated effect of contradictory stimuli that drove them to despair until their personalities were literally turned inside out. Indoctrination merely provided the ready-made model of the new discourse, completing the transformation. That’s what “brainwashing” consisted of.

Afterward, however, knowledge of the human brain’s vulnerability to external influence increased significantly.

Firstly, Austrian psychologist Otto Poezl discovered that extremely weak visual stimuli, imperceptible to consciousness, were more easily retained in memory than stronger stimuli. Soon after, a publicist named Hal C. Becker found that the same applied to auditory stimuli. By implanting an extremely weak and imperceptible voice repeating, “I am honest, I will not steal,” into the background music of a supermarket, Becker reduced shoplifting by 37 percent.

The technique based on Poezl’s discoveries was called “subliminal propaganda,” as it operated below the threshold (in Latin, “limes”) of consciousness.

Now, how about combining Poezl and Pavlov? Personality mutation through contradictory stimulation could very well be achieved subliminally, without shouts, overt indoctrination, or any kind of violence. All done smoothly. The victim wouldn’t even realize it.

The subject is fertile ground for misunderstandings. When someone talks about the psychological slavery that some sects impose on their disciples, the words “brainwashing” quickly come to the interlocutor’s lips. It’s a half-truth. The techniques used by these sects originated from brainwashing, but they only share the same goal, which they achieve through different and more effective means.

The term “brainwashing” entered popular language from the “Moscow trials” in the 1930s, where loyal Communists appeared confessing the most implausible crimes they allegedly committed against the regime. The Western press suggested that the use of some unusual psychological means was responsible for these “conversions,” turning revolutionary heroes into bewildered clowns confessing to fictional crimes.

In 1940, Arthur Koestler’s novel, “Darkness at Noon,” vividly portrayed the psychological torture processes that led Soviet prisoners to lose their identities.

Soon, it became evident to everyone that brainwashing was an application of the theories of Russian neurophysiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), the discoverer of conditioned reflexes produced through stimulus-response conditioning. The idea of shaping human behavior through planned application of punishments and rewards was an extension of Pavlov’s findings, and a significant part of the “reeducation” received by Soviet prisoners was simply that.

However, indoctrination would yield limited results if not for Pavlov’s second discovery: that of “incoherent stimulation.” He studied this in dogs. Initially programming them to salivate at the sight of a red light, which signaled the offering of a steak, Pavlov then alternated showing the steak with the light off and the light without the steak. The dogs became completely bewildered. Breaking the chains of conditioned reflexes, their brains went haywire. The most surprising aspect was how the dogs adapted to the new situation: “The prolonged inhibition of acquired reflexes,” Pavlov wrote, “evokes intolerable anguish, from which the subject frees himself by reacting in opposition to his usual conduct. A dog will become attached to the laboratory worker he disliked and will try to attack the owner he used to like.”

Therefore, the prisoners' change in attitude was not determined by the political content of the indoctrination but by the accumulated effect of contradictory stimuli that drove them to despair until their personalities were literally turned inside out. Indoctrination merely provided the ready-made model of the new discourse, completing the transformation. That’s what “brainwashing” consisted of.

Afterward, however, knowledge of the human brain’s vulnerability to external influence increased significantly.

Firstly, Austrian psychologist Otto Poezl discovered that extremely weak visual stimuli, imperceptible to consciousness, were more easily retained in memory than stronger stimuli. Soon after, a publicist named Hal C. Becker found that the same applied to auditory stimuli. By implanting an extremely weak and imperceptible voice repeating, “I am honest, I will not steal,” into the background music of a supermarket, Becker reduced shoplifting by 37 percent.

The technique based on Poezl’s discoveries was called “subliminal propaganda,” as it operated below the threshold (in Latin, “limes”) of consciousness.

Now, how about combining Poezl and Pavlov? Personality mutation through contradictory stimulation could very well be achieved subliminally, without shouts, overt indoctrination, or any kind of violence. All done smoothly. The victim wouldn’t even realize it.

The next step in this direction was taken by the English psychiatrist William Sargant, while examining prisoners from Chinese concentration camps who were released after the Korean War.51 They had undergone “classical” brainwashing and many were completely neurotic. Initially, Sargant treated them using psychoanalysis, aided by hypnosis, so that, by recalling buried traumas in their subconscious, they could have ab-reactions, as Freud called the suspension of neurotic behaviors after curative catharsis. To his great surprise, he later found that many properly ab-reacted and healed patients had recounted traumatic events that were completely imaginary. So, was the recollection of facts, which psychoanalysis had been so committed to, unnecessary? Yes, it was. Sargant discovered that he could induce ab-reaction simply by suggesting to the patient, during hypnosis, any traumatic event, even remotely analogous to what had happened; once awakened, the patient would remember the suggested terrible sufferings, considering them real, thus undergoing catharsis and being cured.

Based on this discovery, Sargant made one more, decisive for the advancement of psychic domination techniques: a patient subjected to repeated ab-reactions developed a morbid dependence on the therapist. The more ab-reactions, the stronger the bond. This explained a lot. Much of the enslaving fascination exercised by the Armenian mystic Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff over his disciples, for example, was solely due to the “magic” of repeated ab-reactions. In fact, Gurdjieff would either crush them under heaps of embarrassing demands or induce relieving discharges that gave them the impression of fullness and freedom, only to suddenly throw them back into humiliating trials. After repeating the operation several times, the disciples convinced themselves that Gurdjieff was indeed an extraterrestrial.

Gurdjieff equally mastered contradictory stimulation. He rarely said anything with identifiable meaning but always left at least half a dozen possible intentions in the air, causing disciples to exhaust themselves in futile hermeneutic gymnastics. He promised students a theoretical exposition that would finally clarify everything and provided them with a complete cosmological system, which would be entirely replaced in the following weeks, and then again, until mental confusion grew to cosmic scale.

However, to produce the discreet and painless brainwashing of their dreams, two more factors were missing: a means to make the personality mutation permanent and a vocabulary of subliminal signals to make their use more agile. The first was provided by Sargant’s subsequent discovery. The second, by NLP.

What Sargant discovered shortly afterward was astounding. Pavlov had already noticed that the patient, after achieving the inversion of reflexes, became much more sensitive to stimuli than before. The same reactions, in short, could be triggered with increasingly weaker stimuli. Pavlov called this the paradoxical phase of mutation, followed by an ultraparadoxical phase: “In the third stage of protective inhibition, the ultraparadoxical phase, positive responses and conditioned conditioning suddenly begin to turn negative.” Sargant realized that the ultraparadoxical phase was accompanied by “an extreme increase in suggestibility… so that the individual becomes receptive to influences from his environment to which he was immune before”: it was possible to hypnotize a subject against their will. The individual’s attempts to resist the suggestions were futile:52

“Although many hypnotic doctors insist that the cooperation of the patient is essential, in reality, subjects can be hypnotized against their own will… When a normal person actively resists, the nervous system is exhausted, and with constant pressure, it is possible to induce them into a trance quite easily… Repeated attempts usually succeed… Once the subject becomes accustomed to being hypnotized, they can be induced into a trance without realizing what is happening.”

With the discovery of forced hypnosis, the combined use of incoherent stimulation and repeated ab-reactions opened the most promising horizons for mind manipulators. To reduce a man to canine obedience, there was no longer a need for loudspeaker speeches, shouting, threats, or mental torture. On one hand, it was enough to regulate the flow of contradictory information to drive the subject to despair, inclining them toward sudden mutation of their convictions; on the other hand, this information would be even more explosive in its effects if its penetration were silent and discreet – preferably subliminal.

This discovery was confirmed through many other avenues. Psychologist Leon Festinger found that even mild and gradual forms of contradictory stimulation could produce cognitive dissonance, generating neuroses and psychoses.53 A joint study by IBM and Stanford University demonstrated that it is possible to artificially induce a paranoid condition in normal subjects simply by subjecting them to a flow of information that keeps them in a slight state of alertness against the risk of humiliating situations.54 Two researchers, Flo Conway, and Jim Siegelman, discovered that in the closed and artificial environment of pseudo-religious sects, the results described by Sargant could be achieved in an unbelievably short time: in less than a week, sometimes in two or three days, disciples of Moon or Rajneesh underwent a profound personality mutation that Chinese brainwashing technicians would take months or years to produce.55 The secret lay in careful planning of the flow of information, calculated to paralyze consciousness through contradictory stimulation.

The conclusions of these researches can be ordered in a simple and compelling sequence:

  1. One can change a man’s personality and beliefs by subjecting him to the exhaustion resulting from contradictory stimulation (Pavlov).

  2. Once an emotional discharge is produced through these means, the same reaction can be repeated using increasingly weaker stimuli. The person subjected to this treatment becomes docile, credulous, and dependent (Sargant).

  3. Contradictory stimulation can be produced through subliminal means, without the victim being aware of what is happening (Bandler and Grinder).

  4. The technique can be simultaneously applied to all members of a community, as long as they feel cut off from their social and affective roots (Conway and Siegelman). The results will be faster than with individuals alone.

  5. The decisive factor is the planned control of the flow of information, which can be carried out from a distance (IBM).

It is needless to emphasize the facilities that today’s telecommunications network and the informatization of society offer for applying this recipe on a national, continental, or planetary scale. If no one has tried it yet, it is only because they either didn’t want to or stumbled upon some accidental obstacle. There is no theoretical impediment whatsoever.

It is very difficult to assess to what extent governments, secret services, multinational corporations, and political movements of all kinds have advanced so far in the effective use of manipulation techniques. Such an assessment would require vast-scale investigations, beyond the reach of an independent researcher. Therefore, I must confine myself to what I can observe in everyday life, and even superficial observation is enough to show that the manipulation of the psyche has become a common habit in many areas of activity, with its legitimacy unquestioned.

I notice, for example, that the New Age movement could achieve global resonance so rapidly thanks to the massive use of contradictory stimulation, reducing millions of its followers to imbecilic credulity and pathetic subservience. There is no historical precedent for this phenomenon. It bears no resemblance to what was accepted as religious faith in past centuries and in many different civilizations. Faith may predispose a person to believe in wonders and miracles, that is, in disruptions of the usual natural order; it may also lead them to accept the authority of a guru or saint whose knowledge remains beyond all possibility of control; it may even lead them to cheerfully accept sacrifices without immediate apparent advantage. Faith may require a person to contradict common sense, disobey their natural disposition, or fight against their most obvious interests. But there is always a limit. Or rather: there is a whole network of limits that no religion has ever crossed.

The first of these limits is intrinsic contradiction. Driven by faith, a man might believe that God can make the Earth stand still, but not that He can make it spin and stand still at the same time from the same point of view. Reverence to the shaman can make an Indian believe that the rites will bring rain, but not that the rain will be dry. A Christian can accept that Christ rose from the tomb on the third day after death, but not that He was resurrected before dying. The sense of logical identity, which is the same thing as the sense of the unity of reality, has never been violated by any of the great religious beliefs of the past and present, for the simple reason that the unity of reality is the unity of God Himself, underlying even polytheistic mythologies.56

The second limit is the aesthetic sense. The miracle can be beautiful, sublime or terrible. It cannot be banal, ridiculous or grotesque, under penalty of functioning as an anti-miracle, denying faith instead of confirming it. A man might believe that Jesus multiplied the loaves, but it would be difficult to continue believing if the heavenly bread came moldy. The miraculous is not just extraordinary, unusual, gigantic: it must show harmony, beauty, functionality. It must have a meaning, insofar as it is a response to legitimate human longings and not just a colossal peculiarity. The peoples of the past could follow a prophet who announced eternal life or the cure for all diseases, but they would remain indifferent to a heavenly message that promised only to bend all forks.

Finally, there is the limit of patience. A believer cannot wait indefinitely for the promises of their God when none of them ever come true. Continued disappointment acts as an antidote to faith, and thus, in all religions, God grades the trials according to the capacity of the faithful, the value of the promised goods, and the logic of the situation. Moses could wait forty years for the liberation of his people, but he did not have to wait forty weeks for God to send manna, nor forty minutes for his staff to transform into a serpent. Miracles appear, in this framework, as anticipations that give believers the courage to persevere in faith. Christ himself criticized the people who asked for miracles, implying that perfect faith would not require them, but did not stop performing them abundantly, knowing that human faith is necessarily imperfect.

Now, what characterizes the worldwide phenomenon of contemporary pseudo-religiosity is precisely the boeotic credulity that takes any gross phenomenon of telepathy or hypnosis as a message from heaven, that accepts “divine signs” devoid of the most basic aesthetic coherence or practical functionality, that continues to believe with fanatical zeal despite the most obvious refutations. It is faith reduced to blind belief and completely amputated from the most basic "discernment of spirits."57 The destruction of traditional popular religiosity—attacked on one side by materialists and on the other by the ideology of the New Age—has not produced any “enlightenment” or “collective illumination,” but an unprecedented lowering of the level of consciousness of the masses. The inhabitants of large cities today believe in fictions that would make an Indian smile.58

How did we reach this point? What are the causes and agents behind this phenomenon that radically differentiates the current world from all previous civilizations?

The answer is disappointingly simple and Pavlovian: modern man has been subjected to a dose of contradictory stimulation greater than anything his ancestors could even imagine; he has already surpassed the ultraparadoxical phase, and all his chains of reflexes have been inverted or perverted, and now he only believes in what is blatantly contrary to evidence.

A fertile field for the abuses of paradoxical stimulation is propaganda. The slogans, figures, jingles, and logos of propaganda populate the imagination of today’s man exactly as angels, demons, heroes, and goblins from traditional imaginaries did in the past. They form the basic vocabulary in which city dwellers express their desires, aspirations, and fears. The urban man is trapped in the circle of advertising language, as his imagination has no other source to seek inspiration and models of behavior beyond mass communications. Thus, while consciously distinguishing between propaganda and truth, knowing that propaganda is a universe of deceit, he cannot help but be guided by it in practice, since intelligence can only set the will in motion through the imagination, and his imagination has no other contents than those that have been inoculated by propaganda. Hence, he continually acts against what he knows. For example, he knows that driving at high speeds is a stupid recklessness, but he has no other model of the strong man he wants to be than Ayrton Senna. He knows that low-nicotine cigarettes can be dangerously radioactive, but his imagination—through the combined effect of the anti-nicotine campaign and cigarette propaganda—associates them with a perfectly foolish sense of hygiene and safety. The rupture between conduct and belief, harmless in isolated cases, when generalized to all sectors and moments of life, causes unbearable anguish that must be repressed at all costs. But repressing this anguish is to abdicate, in the act, all deep sense of reality, to condemn oneself to an incessant fluctuation between hopeless fantasy and hopeless cynicism. Forced to act as if he believes in what he denies, the inhabitant of large cities today is schizoid, able to believe in reality only when it makes no sense and able to see meaning only in the denial of reality. Much of what is now called culture is merely the elaborate and pedantic reproduction of this state of mind. Ideologies such as Gramscism, Richard Rorty’s neopragmatism, neo-Epicureanism, and David Bohm’s “new model of language” are the “philosophical” legitimization of a pathology: unable to establish themselves in the reality in which our ancestors lived, intellectuals begin to produce fictitious realities, either by creating them in the laboratory or constructing them through suffocating artificial deductions, or by having the masses stage them on the political stage with great violence and bloodshed to give plausibility to a delirious plot. The old opposition between escapism and activism has lost all meaning in a world where political action has become an escape for the relief of immature minds, and where the most extravagant fantasies are celebrated as forms of “protest” against an evil world.

The shattering of consciousness by the empire of propaganda is vehemently condemned by some activist intellectuals, but they themselves abundantly practice paradoxical stimulation on the defenseless minds of students, readers, listeners, and viewers. Today’s typical exasperated intellectual systematically defends contradictory claims: liberation of abortion and repression of sexual harassment, political moralism and erotic immorality, drug liberalization and cigarette prohibition, destruction of traditional religions and defense of pre-modern cultures, direct democracy and state control of gun ownership, unrestricted freedom for citizens and increased state intervention in private conduct, anti-racism and defense of “cultural identities” based on racial separation, and so on. Whoever listens to them ends up going mad, but who is immune to their influence? The public does not always realize the contradictions, but this is even worse because they go straight to the subconscious, influencing their behavior without seeking permission from conscious judgment. By perverting men’s capacity for reality judgment, intellectual activism ends up reducing language to nothing more than an instrument for expressing senseless angers and unfounded demands, which do not answer to reason, common sense, or the most basic sense of humanity. The long-term effect is to raise to unbearable levels the collective pressure of unacknowledged anxieties and guilt. But the authors of this feat are themselves their first victims. It is not surprising that so often apologists of the absurd begin to elaborate systems of justifications composed of pure rationalizations in the Freudian sense of the word, according to which objective reality does not exist or language has no relationship to it. When philosophers start declaring with obscene satisfaction that truth can only be conventionally invented or feigned through the enactment of political beliefs, they must certainly have good personal reasons to find something comforting in these ideas. They help them bear the fictitious and hallucinatory world they themselves created.

The culmination of a hundred years of research on the psychic domination of man by man is reached at the moment when all elites—the ones momentarily in power and those struggling to conquer it—unite in a pact against the freedom of individual consciousness, consecrating psychological manipulation techniques and paradoxical stimulation as legitimate and acceptable weapons in the battle of ideas. From that moment on, it matters little who wins the dispute: humanity will lose. Compared to this universal empire of imposture, what do all the minor and local evils denounced and fought by various competing ideologies matter? What difference does it make if the manipulation of the mind is undertaken under the pretext of keeping the masses in the passivity of a conservative routine or driving them to make a revolution? In both cases, man is treated like a Pavlovian dog. Whether trained to doze quietly in front of the fireplace or to advance with teeth bared against strangers, a dog is always a dog. Compared to this fall of the ontological condition of humanity, all the other evils that afflict it are mere everyday inconveniences. What do racism, poverty, social injustice, and political corruption matter if the weapon that has been consecrated in the struggle to preserve or extinguish them is the enslavement of the human species, the abolition of consciousness, the reduction of the masses to a herd of remotely controlled animals through a technology of deceit that deprives man of the supreme good which, once lost, is irretrievable forever?

Four decades ago, the universal use of this weapon was only a trend, not an accomplished fact. Even then, a sensitive observer could write these words:

"The problem of Liberties of the Mind is as urgent and practical today as the problem of emancipation of slaves was in the past.

The social disease that culminates in the annihilation of independent thought and the will for independence is a disease of rare subtlety, which, making men believe they are thinking freely when they are not, flatters and conceals itself.

The purpose of the attack is the oldest of all: to produce chaos. The desired victory is the definitive chaos in the mind of the world, insanity through failure to distinguish and through fantasies of power, a mist of fragmented reason in a whirling, ungovernable, purposeless, and causeless dust.

The battle to be fought is not only between party and party, or even, fundamentally, between those whose emphasis is on reason and those whose emphasis is on faith. It is, in my view, a struggle that transcends all differences except one, concerning the validity of the human mind, its right to distinguish between good and evil, and its power to undertake its journey in the light of this distinction. The danger we face is that there are great forces at work in the world that prevent us from embarking on this journey and destroy our will to do so."59

Among these forces, the most notorious are pragmatism, neopositivism, Marxism, pseudo-religion, and the New Age. Epicureanism is an ancestor of them all, and its legacy is not yet exhausted.

Chapter 5 – The nature of Epicureanism

§14 Epicurean junk

But if Epicureanism is indefensible as a theory, if as a practice it is only a hoax to deceive an undiscerning public, how then could it compete with other philosophies and defend its place, albeit modest, among the ideas that still arouse some interest today? One possible answer is that, despite its weaknesses, and perhaps because of them, it constitutes a significant phenomenon. It is a kind of shadow, destined to accompany philosophy through the centuries without ever disappearing, projecting on the ground the obscure and inverted image that, by having the external profile of philosophy, will always be taken as such by anyone who approaches philosophical themes from the outside and driven by interests alien to those of the philosopher — by the interests of the practical man bent on “transforming the world”. It is a permanent misunderstanding, into which the human mind is destined to fall from time to time, only to have to rise again, subsequently, by returning to the philosophical spirit.

If this is so, it is not surprising that the Epicurean proceeds, in everything, in a manner inverse to that of the philosopher; that he is an eternal anti-philosopher, a misosoph, someone who abhors wisdom and flees from it by whatever shortcuts and detours present themselves. It is significant that this little character, in addition to cultivating in his garden all the classical sophisms, which constitute for him a substitute for theory, also strives, in the field of practical action, to replace history with a system of silly lies designed to place Epicurus at the center of the evolution of human thought, kicking to the periphery all those who dared to oppose him. Unable to make itself accepted as serious philosophy, Epicureanism took revenge by producing a caricature of the history of philosophy, forged from pure resentment. As Nelson Rodrigues would say, failure went to his head.

These fibs reappear, cyclically and regularly, wherever a new defense of Epicurus presents itself. They could therefore not be absent from MASP. Pessanha did not invent, properly speaking, new tall tales. He merely re-exhibited, in front of an audience that was unaware of them and to which they seemed new, the classic legends that the Epicureans, in the obscurity of ostracism, wove and cultivated for twenty centuries, gnawing with envy at the dominant philosophy.

It is advisable to review some of them, to show, once again, that the school that cheats in the field of theory would not have any reason to exempt itself from doing so also in the field of facts.

In his effort to canonize Epicurus, the lecturer, echoing the long tradition of Epicurean marketing, painted a moral portrait of the philosopher as a serene ascetic in his garden, absorbed in elevated meditations, while around him the fury of his opponents hurled odious calumnies at him. They even called him “impious” and even a “pig”. And he, like a new Socrates, endured everything with elegance and resignation, concerned only with the things of the underworld and oblivious to the vain agitation of human atoms.

Well, it was not like that. Epicurus, despite his declared ethics of indifference to the world, was incapable of remaining indifferent to the attacks of his adversaries, and even less capable of responding to them with elegance. He was famous for the verbal incontinence with which he defamed above all the absent, the exiled, those who were in disgrace before power. For example, he called Aristotle, recently exiled, a “drug dealer”; he did not spare even those to whom he owed a personal debt. After being a disciple of Nausiphanes for many years and having taken from him some of the main ideas that would come to constitute Epicureanism, he did not hesitate to call his old master a “worm” and “prostitute”. This was his characteristic style of dealing with those from whom he had copied something: to cover them with insults, to affect independence.

Is it strange that such a guy would be called a pig? The Epicureans, of course, excuse these verbal excesses as manifestations of the master’s righteous moral indignation. This is what Carlos García Gual does, for example, in his apologetic little book.60 But why shouldn’t we explain the attacks of the adversaries by the same motivation? Why should the same procedure be commendable in one man and condemnable in others?

The habit of defamation, moreover, transmitted itself like a virus to the following generations of Epicureans, who cultivated it throughout the centuries. In the monumental study he devoted to Aristotle, Ingemar Düring wrote the following about the attacks that forced the Stagirite to seek exile: “His most inflamed enemies are found among the Epicureans. The Epicurean defamation campaign left deep marks and was resurrected in the Renaissance by Gassendi and Patrizzi”.61

The Epicurean hereditary tendency to play with appearances to create persuasive false impressions (the logic of signs is one technique for doing this) is still evident. The modern-day Epicurean may utilize the dominant prestige that Aristotle came to gain in later centuries, and the disrepute into which Epicureanism fell, to retroactively create the impression that in Athenian society, the Aristotelians were the dominant class, and the Epicureans a handful of brave souls fighting against oppression. This is exactly what Pessanha implied to the MASP audience.

But the fact is that Aristotle, in Athens, was and remained always a foreigner, looked down upon by the beautiful people. Unlike Plato — writes Düring, in what is the greatest and best among recent studies on the subject —, Aristotle “was not the head of a school, but only one of many foreign scientists in the Academy. He had barely achieved a certain position as a teacher, and was forced to flee to Asia Minor… Aristotle had few friends and many enemies. For some, the motive was political hatred… Theopompus and Theocritus of Chios hated Hermias (Aristotle’s father-in-law) and transferred this hatred to Aristotle. Democrates and Timaeus facilitated the slander of posterity, of a political nature. Others, on the other hand, opposed Aristotle because they disapproved of his doctrines and philosophy… Eubulides, a member of the Megarian school, responded to him with personal insults… Thus, the anti-Aristotelian tradition was strong already in Aristotle’s lifetime”62. To top it all, the fact is that after Aristotle’s death, almost nothing was left of Aristotelianism, which disappeared from the memory of the Greeks only to resurface three centuries later, on the threshold of the Christian Era;63 and shortly thereafter it disappeared almost completely again, only reappearing in the twelfth century.

But while Aristotle, to escape death, was going into exile, what was happening with Epicurus? It is false that he suffered any serious persecution or attack in life. Although his philosophy was severely refuted by posterity, while he lived he was in the lap of luxury, never being bothered by the powerful.

The Epicurean school flourished in Athens when the city, occupied by the tyrant Demetrius, was under the dominion of terror, with twelve thousand of its citizens having their political rights suspended. Under these conditions, several schools were closed and many philosophers — potential adversaries of Epicurus — had to emigrate: the new sect, which preached political absenteeism and posed no threat to the regime, found a free field to expand. As it indiscriminately accepted any disciples, without any intellectual selection, the garden quickly filled with unhappily married ladies and bored millionaires. A success.

Curiously, the rise of politically harmless thinkers in times of tyranny is a phenomenon that we here in Brazil know well. Pessanha, above all, could not have ignored it, as he was one of the many professors dismissed by the military dictatorship. One can imagine what our generation, at the time, thought and said about the new professors who took the place of the dismissed and began to shine in the chairs with their politically harmless ideas. Were we all then indecent slanderers, as Pessanha wanted to make it seem like the critics of Epicurus were? Or, on the contrary, did we have good reasons to think that the circumstances of the success of those people were at least a sign of the emptiness of their ideas? Epicurus, like them, did not suffer persecutions: he benefited from the persecution that others suffered.

There was no persecution against the Epicureans. What happened, while Epicurus was alive, was just a buzz of gossip, provoked by the fact that the school accepted even notorious prostitutes among its students. Well, which people in the world would not be hooked by gossip seeing millionaires lock themselves up with prostitutes within the walls of a garden? To call this persecution, to give these trifles a dimension comparable to the death of Socrates or the martyrdom of Christians, is to abdicate all sense of the ridiculous.

Moreover, the fact that Epicurus and his disciples showed deep indignation at such trivialities for twenty centuries, instead of forgiving them as banal manifestations of human indiscretion, demonstrates in them a pettiness of soul that makes them unworthy of the name of philosophers.

Nevertheless, the Epicurean tradition, with Pessanha behind it, adorned the master with the traits of a holy ascetic, emphasizing that his asceticism was even more meritorious because it did not count, like the Christians', on the expectation of a reward in another life. Christian asceticism appears, in this light, as a selfish trade with God, while Epicureanism assumes the noble appearance of a free sacrifice. But Epicurean asceticism was not, and could never be, the exercise of a free virtue, independent of any expectation of benefits (as found, for example, in Hindu military ethics, Stoic morality, or Muslim mystics who profess to “renounce Paradise” to be content with the love of God as an end in itself). It was, on the contrary, and openly, an instrument towards an end: the conquest of earthly happiness.

The highly Epicurean García Gual emphasizes that, for Epicurus, any philosophical idea that did not aim at relieving pain and obtaining pleasure, the most immediate relief and the most immediate possible pleasure, was totally meaningless. The philosopher of the garden, he says, “does not want to risk personal, current happiness, within reach of the hand” for anything. Philosophy and asceticism were therefore, for Epicurus, merely instrumental, as much as those of a Christian monk. If the latter is “self-interested,” the Epicurean is no less so. The difference is that the reward expected by the Christian is spiritual and from beyond the grave, and that of the Epicurean is material and short-term. If there is any merit difference, it is in favor of the Christian, whose asceticism develops the virtues of faith and hope in an ultimate meaning of existence, which Epicureanism suppresses. Between the two “trades”, the Epicurean is merely more petty: he gives no credit to any ultimate meaning. He demands immediate payment.

Another beloved legend to Epicurean hearts is that the school fell into disrepute and oblivion, from antiquity until now, thanks to a conspiracy hatched by Aristotelians and Christians and inspired, essentially, by religious prejudices. At the heart of an ominous silence, however – the legend continues – the courageous voices of some servants of the truth rose from time to time, to proclaim the greatness of the forgotten master.

The story is different. Although appreciated, here and there, by literati and bissextile thinkers, Epicurus was held in very low esteem by almost all philosophers. The reasons for the rejection of Epicureanism were almost never of a religious nature, but generally stemmed from purely philosophical reasons.

The reprobatory current begins with the Stoics and Aristotelians, enters the Patristic era with Lactantius and Dionysius, extends into Augustine, crosses scholasticism without diminishing in any way, and penetrates with the same force into the Modern Age, finding its fullest expression in Hegel. This philosopher found in Epicurus “not the slightest shadow of a concept” and saw in Epicureanism only “vain words and empty representations.”

The hypothesis that this whole varied and millennial assembly was conjured against Epicurus moved only by prejudices and fanaticisms fueled by the Catholic Church does not deserve discussion. You must have practiced a lot of Tetrapharmakon to be able to see Stoics and Protestants as secret agents of the Pope.

As for the devoted apostles who kept the Epicurean potato warm under the crust of universal ice, there have always been some, of course. The prototype of them was Pierre Gassend, Latinized Petrus Gassendi, whom the snobs insist on pronouncing in French Gassandí (1502-1655). Pessanha said he admired him as an important link in the materialist tradition (see ahead §19). But the tribute that Gassend pays to Epicurus is merely verbal, as on the other hand he defends theses that are absolutely incompatible with Epicureanism, such as a Democritus atomism and the notion of God as an efficient cause of cosmic movement. The affinity between Epicurus and Gassendi is merely negative: it lies in their common hatred for Aristotle. Gassendi considered himself an Epicurean precisely because he did not understand Epicurus, which is also the only good reason why someone can adhere to Epicureanism — a polysensuous philosophy, which offers no other basis for the unity of a tradition than that of a sum of dislikes, where all the contras fit. Hatred of the entire Western philosophical tradition would inspire, in the 20th century, Paul Nizan’s Epicureanism, grafted with Nietzschean diatribes. In the random dance of atoms, all combinations are possible.

It is not entirely accurate what was said above, that Pessanha did not invent any new fable. The most daring of the grafts was, at least in part, his original work (with some help from Nizan and García Gual): revitalize the dying body of Epicureanism with an injection of modern physics: Epicurus would have been a precursor to Planck’s and Heisenberg’s indeterminism.

Again, it is the unity of a negation. The common point is the absence of laws governing matter. In the indeterminist universe, atoms move without any predetermined script, as if each is freely following its clinamen; and if by chance, colliding with each other, they manage to coagulate in any corner of space a set of things and beings more or less stable, accessible to human perception and governed by laws we call Newtonian, they do not do so by obligation, but by the effect of a statistical coincidence, which does not compromise their freedom outside this restricted zone. So too, musicians who happen to gather at any point in the cosmos, say, in a bar, and decide to play together there, would for that brief moment make gestures coordinated according to the score, and then go away to their respective homes or wherever they please, by the route that each prefers, on foot, by car, or by train as the case may be, each whistling along the way a different melody, or not whistling at all, happy or sad depending on the state of his liver, smoking or not smoking, without even asking what the others might be doing meanwhile.

Described thus, the universe of modern physics might seem like a confirmation of Epicurus. But who said that Planck’s and Heisenberg’s indeterminism has a negative meaning? Who said that the indeterminacy of the movements of atoms proves, for Planck and Heisenberg, the nonexistence of a central power regulating the cosmos? At least this was not how Heisenberg himself understood his theory. The nonexistence of physical laws governing the cosmos was not for him an argument against the existence of God, but rather against the mechanistic determinism that denied God based on those same laws. Heisenberg’s God does not act upon the cosmos as a watchmaker upon a watch — as Newton’s God does —, but rather as the musician who, indifferent to the physical mechanism that produces the sounds, organizes them according to the form of an aesthetic intention, making use of any means or mechanisms that present themselves, whether a reed, a metal tube or a sheep’s gut, which are respectively reduced to the flute, the trumpet, and the violin string; and who would use other means if there were any and if necessary, since beauty is not based on the laws of physical causality but on aesthetic intentionality — which is capable, moreover, of absorbing into the superior form of a harmony any sounds, even unpleasant in themselves, that the vibrated matter may produce. The order of the total form supersedes here the order or disorder of the matters and elements, absorbing and surpassing them by giving them a meaning. The absence of rigid causality, of a mechanism, was for Heisenberg the proof that the cosmos is the expression of a creative intelligence and not an inert machine.64

A physical theory, in itself, does not prove anything, philosophically. On the contrary, it always requires some philosophical basis. Heisenberg sought his in Malebranche and Leibniz, that is, in classic rationalism, in what could be most antagonistic to Epicurean nonsense.65

§15 The escape to the garden

“We must be aware that the threat looming over us all is not only to die, but to die like fools” – GEORGES BERNANOS

It is somewhat ironic that Epicureanism has entered popular vocabulary as a synonym for sybaritic enjoyment. It is nothing of the sort. It is a tragic dilettantism, which delights in the defeat of man, squeezed between the blind force of desire and the blind force of exterior fatality that eternally frustrates him. What this conception describes to us is a chaotic, absurd world, where atoms and men vainly seek to escape from pain by pursuing the mirage of an impossible pleasure, which only redoubles the sufferings. The only refuge is resigned meditation, within the walls of the garden. But what awaits the meditator inside is an inescapable conclusion: the certainty of death, without any hope of another life. All that remains then is to embellish the image of death, to make an apology for oblivion. The final message of Epicureanism is, strictly speaking, nothingness. The path of the Epicurean ascetic is the one that materialist Heinrich Heine would later describe in a brief poem:66

“You ask and investigate, you search and you strive, and in the end they fill your mouth with a handful of earth. And is this an answer?”

That the prospect of this crushing outcome could attract a multitude of devotees to Epicureanism is surprising. But Epicurus' Garden had many plants: some hallucinogenic, some anesthetic, and others deadly — the final answer. The Tetrapharmakon mixed them all, in the graded series of an abyssal pedagogy. Epicurus was not only a theoretician of necrophilia, but a master of the enchanting discourse, a genuine hypnotizer, Jim Jones avant la lettre, able to adorn with all the flowers of rhetoric the path that leads six feet under. His own name, from a root that means “to help,” “to assist” or “to medicate,” must not have been unrelated to his success: it’s worth a slogan.

But the root of his success lies elsewhere. The seed of persuasion does not germinate unless it is planted in the fertile soil of collective longings. The time of Epicurus longed for relief, oblivion, sleep. With democratic institutions devastated, the main philosophical schools closed, the dreams of moral and political reform that had fueled public discussions extinguished, a fearful silence had fallen over the squares, separating and isolating individuals. Everyone locked themselves in the cubicle of their particular anxieties, with no outlet for collective action which, in the absence of personal philosophical consciousness, serves to integrate human atoms into a greater sense of existence and redeem them from their insignificance.

In this context, the influx of disciples to Epicurus' garden was one of those cases of widespread evasion, typical of times when great social ideals are in reflux: “The flight of intellectuals to the solitude of the wilderness — wrote Jakob Burckhardt — is the mark of times when the world falls: orbis ruit.” I don’t need to go far for an example. My generation — which is Pessanha’s — deeply experienced the solitude and exile, in the years following 1968. Crushed were the ideals of nationalist left, which gave a sense of historical participation to Brazilian intellectuals, the general defection that followed the Institutional Act no. 5 led many to escape through drugs, erotic intoxication, “oriental” pseudo-mysticism imported from California. Marx and Guevara were replaced by Allan Watts and Timothy Leary. Popular music marked the change of sentiments in the university environment: open and combative protest disappeared from the lyrics of songs, giving way to melancholic lamentation; “Felicidade” by Caetano Veloso, an invitation to escape through the “flight of thought”, and another one, the title of which escapes me, where Elis Regina’s pained voice sighed for “a house in the field” — refuge of the militant that disappointment had transformed into a dilettante. They would serve as jingles for Epicurus' Garden. Around this time José Américo Motta Pessanha, a leftist professor expelled from the chair, went to work at Abril Publishing, where he edited Os Pensadores. It was probably on this occasion that he discovered a relief in the Epicurean pharmacopoeia.67

But the comparison of the epochs is still imprecise. In a land that is narrowing under the yoke of tyrants, the intelligentsia flees to the silence of the countryside to seek inner life, the path to heaven. Philosopher Boethius, a politically persecuted man, meditated in prison about the inner benefits of forced isolation: “It is the defeated earth that gives us the stars”. But, in Epicurus' time, the path to heaven was also closed. The official religion, discredited by philosophical criticism, had lost all attraction. Intellectualized mysticism had become out of reach, with the exile of the philosophers. Expelled from the earth, with no door to heaven, the desperate Athenian of that time had only one way left: the path downwards. Six feet under. To eternal oblivion. Epicureanism smoothed this path. More than mere political depression, its success stemmed from a state of complete spiritual constraint, from compressive despair, which predisposed men to accept the most demeaning promises of relief. It is a philosophy for men reduced to the condition of rats, for whom the sewer is a hope.

Epicureanism is, in short, a nihilism; a refined and falsely pleasurable form of nihilism. It is, strictly speaking, the first complete system of nihilist thought to emerge in the history of the West.

But nihilism, proposing nothing, does not propose anything. It is refractory to any project of action, especially of moral and political action. Karl Marx, who appreciated in Epicureanism its critique of the official Greek religion and its “dialectical” mix of theory and practice, saw well the political danger of its evasionist morality. You can’t change the world by running away from it.

But here, the mystery that this book is investigating reaches its densest obscurity. For we had begun — we: I and the reader68 — by noticing the political goal consciously aimed at by the cycle of lectures on Ethics. We saw, soon after, that Pessanha could not be uninformed about this goal; first, for being one of the most eminent members of the group that planned the cycle; second, because, for several years before, he had been, as editor of the series The Thinkers, preparing the ground for the transformation of philosophy into a political weapon serving certain ends. How then to explain that, precisely at the decisive moment when philosophy emerged from a long subterranean germination to assume in the light of day its role as conductor of national politics, he ascended to the podium of MASP to call the people to evade to the Garden of Epicurus? How did he expect to awaken the audience to the political struggle, if at the same time he invited them to the sleep of forgetfulness?

If we wanted to understand Pessanha’s intentions, at this moment we seem to be farther than ever from reaching a clear answer. We have been gradually gathering the threads of this investigation, and we seem to have obtained nothing more than an unmanageable knot.

But let the reader not be discouraged. In dialectics, it is just like that: when the darkness of contradiction thickens to the unbearable, it is when we are getting closer to the denouement that will clarify everything.

Book III – Marx

Chapter 6 – The replacement of the world

§16 Epicurus and Marx

“Marx, in preferring to ‘transform’ rather than ‘understand’ the world, was led to evaluate a thought by its ability to mobilize” – Alfred FABRE-LUCE

Epicurus inverts, as seen in §10, the logical relationship between practice and theory. If normally theory is the logical foundation of practice and this is the exemplification of that in the field of facts, in Epicureanism, practice artificially produces the psychological condition that will make the theory credible, and the theoretical discourse will be nothing more than the discursive element of practice, the verbal translation of the belief produced by habit. Epicurean theory does not describe the perceived world, but its practice alters, through exercises, the perception of the world, so that it becomes similar to the theory. It is not about understanding the world, but transforming it.

The reader must have recognized the previous sentence: it is the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach by Karl Marx. Everything leads us to believe that the young Marx’s coexistence with the philosophy of Epicurus — the subject of his teaching thesis — left deeper marks in finished Marxism than scholars usually assume and than the adult Marx himself was interested in declaring. The Marxist symbiosis of theory with practice does not come from Hegel, but is an Epicurean inheritance. However, this symbiosis, abolishing the normal distance between the sphere of action and speculation, suppresses, in Marx as in Epicurus, the difference between the effective and the possible, and plunges us into a hallucinatory crisis where there is no longer room for the theoretical retreat that grounds the very notion of objective truth.69 Desire, impulse, ambition — of the individual soul or revolutionary masses — become the sole foundation of a worldview where theory serves only to rhetorically stimulate practical action or to legitimize as satisfactory whatever has resulted from it in practice once the action has been carried out. Even if the action produces effects completely different from those expected, there will no longer be enough critical distance to judge them, and they will not only be accepted, but celebrated by theory as normal and desirable: theory has no autonomous value there, it is reduced to the role of a rationalization a posteriori, of an apology for the accomplished fact. The ability of the world’s left to justify in the name of a humanitarian utopia the worst atrocities of the communist regime — and, with communism exterminated in the USSR, to continue to preach with the greatest innocence socialist ideals as if there were no intrinsic relationship between them and what happened in the Soviet hell — is a morbid inheritance that, through Marx, came from Epicureanism. It is not surprising that a century of Marxist thought has culminated in Antonio Gramsci, the theorist of “absolute historicism”, who openly assumes what in Marx was only hinted and implicit: the abolition of the concept of objective truth and the subjugation of all cognitive activity to the goals and criteria of revolutionary praxis; the absorption of logic into rhetoric, of science into ideological propaganda.70 It is also understandable that, in another and parallel line of this evolution, which leads to Reich and Marcuse, erotic desire, and no longer the force of objective economic causes, is the driving force that drives progress and triggers revolution. These developments manifest in broad daylight tendencies that in Marx were already latent as inheritances from his original Epicureanism. The fact that they have resurfaced in the evolution of Marxism shows that Marx knew how to repress them, but not overcome them. In vain Marxist thinkers like Lukács or Horkheimer, more attuned to the classic traditions of the West and eager to affiliate Marx to them, protested against the invasion of irrationalism that, especially since the 1960s, ended up contaminating the entire global left: as Dr. Freud said, the rejected past returns with redoubled force.71

Marxism and Epicureanism seem to go in opposite directions: the latter, escaping from the world, to close itself in the garden with the community of the chosen; the former, outward, towards the collective action that will transform the world. But it is a difference of scale before that of nature: in both cases, it is about involving human beings in an absorbing and hypnotic praxis, which will forever move them away from the temptation of objectivity, leaving no room for theoretical retreat and trapping all their intellectual energies in a closed circuit of rhetorical self-persuasion. It is about neutralizing human intelligence, setting it on the trail of utopian goals that, by the infernal dialectic that transfigures each defeat into a sign of imminent victory, will absorb it more completely the more the results obtained in the effort fall far from the dreamt objectives. This alone explains the phenomenon of thousands of intellectuals refusing, for almost a century, to see the evils of communism, or, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to acknowledge any connection between these evils and the socialist ideal. Is it really the effect of a singular scotoma that the leftist intelligentsia sees in every right-wing movement, even timid ones, the mark of a resurgent Nazi-fascism, and on the other hand can believe that the socialist ideal emerged from the Gulag unscathed? Isn’t it a strange morbidity that the ideology that reduces the action of individuals to mere expression of deep ideological currents explains Stalin’s sixty million victims as the result of the fortuitous evil of a single man, with no roots in the ideology he professed? That the intransigent defenders of the concept of society as a substantial whole, as an organic block where ideology and practice merge inseparably, explain the crimes of the Soviet government as accidental deviations completely unrelated to Marxist ideology? Isn’t it demented to insist on maintaining the image of Karl Marx – or even that of Lenin – clean from any contagion with the crimes of the Soviet dictatorship, when not even Jesus Christ was spared responsibility for the cruelties of the Inquisition? Isn’t it strange that after everything that has been revealed about communist tyranny, socialism is still considered a respectable ideal, when crimes on a much smaller scale were enough to forever stain the image of Italian fascism, Francoism, or Latin American dictatorships? Isn’t it ultimately an intellectual anomaly that the philosophy which most emphasized the historical-social grounding of abstract concepts – condemning as “metaphysical” any admission of a-historical or supra-historical essences – now presents socialism as a pure essence uncontaminated by a century of communist experience? How to explain the stubborn blindness of philosophers, intellectuals, artists, among the most notable of the century, if not by the formidable illusionist power inherent in the very root of Marxism, by its almost diabolical ability to transfigure the framework of appearances and lead people to see things differently from what they are?

That Marx personally had a tremendous sense of theater, pretense, and sleight of hand, is something that biographers have established with sufficient certainty72. But this would not be enough to give his philosophy such a power to deceive consciousness. However, when we notice that the first academic interest of young Marx was devoted to the study of the prince of philosophical illusionists, and then we find identical, in Epicurus and him, the hallucinogenic and purposeful muddle of theory in practice and practice in theory, we then understand the inexhaustible virulence of the Epicurean heritage, capable of traversing millennia and re-emerging with every new cyclical effort to establish somewhere in the world the reign of imposture.

§17 Comments on the 11th “Thesis on Feuerbach”

“Antes que te derribe, olmo del Duero,
con su hacha el leñador, y el carpintero
te convierta en melena de campaña,
lanza de carro o yugo de carreta;
antes que rojo en el hogar, mañana,
ardas de alguna mísera caseta,
al borde de un camino;
antes que te descuaje un torbellino
y tronche el soplo de las sierras blancas;
antes que el río hasta la mar te empuje
por valles y barrancas,
olmo, quiero anotar en mi cartera
la gracia de tu rama verdecida.
Mi corazón espera
también, hacia la luz y hacia la vida,
otro milagro de la primavera”.

ANTONIO MACHADO, “A un olmo seco”.

(“Before the woodsman brings you down, elm of Duero,
with his axe, and the carpenter
turns you into a mane of the countryside,
a wagon’s spear or a cart’s yoke;
before, red in the hearth, tomorrow,
you burn in some wretched hut,
on the edge of a road;
before a whirlwind uproots you
and the gusts of the white mountain ranges break you;
before the river pushes you to the sea
through valleys and ravines,
elm, I want to note in my wallet
the grace of your green-leafed branch.
My heart also waits,
towards the light and towards life,
for another miracle of spring.”

ANTONIO MACHADO, “To a Dry Elm”.)

I can explain better and give a more “technical” basis to what was said in the previous paragraph. The reader who prefers to skip directly to §18 will not lose the thread of the argument, just deprive themselves of a more rigorous — and more boring — demonstration.

“So far – says the 11th Thesis73 – philosophers have limited themselves to interpreting the world. It is now up to them to transform it”.

1. To whom is the call addressed? If Marx refers, in this thesis, to the traditional concepts of theoria and praxis, we must admit that indeed philosophers, since always, have been busy interpreting the world, making theory, because they believed that this was their specific task, which distinguished them from other men, in turn occupied with praxis. Philosophers interpreted the world, while other men transformed it. Most men have always been involved with praxis, and uninterested in theoria, the contemplation of truth. By adopting the opposite attitude to the majority, philosophers provided a dialectical counterweight to praxis: the contemplative life opposed the active life. Now, if non-philosophical men have always been busy transforming the world while the philosopher contemplated and interpreted it, what sense would it make to summon them to a praxis in which they have been involved by immemorial habit, and from which they never thought of leaving? This cannot be the meaning of Marx’s thesis. His call is not addressed to men in general, taken indiscriminately, much less to men of praxis, but specifically to philosophers. They are the ones who have been busy only interpreting the world. Therefore, it is up to them to summon a change of attitude. The 11th Thesis on Feuerbach essentially proposes a basic change in the activity of the philosopher as such. It is not just about inaugurating a new praxis, but a new type of theoria, which in turn will consist of praxis.

2. To know what this change consists of, we need to understand what the preceding attitude was. What does the interpretative attitude consist of, which Marx opposes to the transforming attitude? Being theoria and praxis classical concepts of Greek philosophy, it is to this latter that we must refer ourselves. (It is true that the term praxis has in Marx, or claims to have, a specific and different meaning, but this is not the point, since, if the ancient philosophers to whom Marx aims made theoria in opposition to praxis, we cannot suppose that they had in mind the Marxist sense of the word praxis, but the Greek sense).

In Greek philosophy, the word theoria had a precise meaning. It was correlated with the notions of logos (“reason” or “language”), eidos (“idea” or “essence”), ón (“being”), and aletheia (“patency”, “unveiling”, revelation of hidden truth).

The theoretic man, the philosopher, did not generically occupy himself with contemplating, with looking, in a sense that other men could also contemplate and look. For example, all men contemplated theater performances, the beauty of human beings and the landscape, etc. The common man’s contemplation could be playful, aesthetic, utilitarian or whatever. That of the philosopher, not. It was a very specific type of contemplation, with a specific motive and a specific objective, which made it, properly, a philosophical contemplation and not any other. The philosopher contemplated things to capture their essence (eidos), revealing (aletheia) their true being (ón); then the philosopher said (logos) what that thing was, revealing in words (aletheia) the true being (ón) that was hidden.

In other words, things, phenomena, were for the philosopher signs, which he deciphered in search of meaning or essence. Between the sign and the meaning, the interpretative key was reason or logos. Through reason, the philosopher man jumped from one plane to another: from the plane of unstable, shifting, deceptive phenomenality to the plane of essences, of true being. This plane was considered superior, because it encompassed and transcended the world of phenomena (it contains all manifest phenomena, and a countless number of unmanifested essences or possibilities), and also because it is stable, immutable, eternal. This stance became clearer and more self-aware from Platonism, but it was already that of the Eleatics. In short, it is based on the belief that all facts and all beings are phenomena — “appearances” — of something: they are externalizations or exemplifications of the essences or possibilities, contained eternally in Divine Intelligence. The Greek philosopher contemplated things, therefore, sub specie æternitatis, that is, in the category of eternity, in the light of eternity; he sought in them their eternal significance, superior to the phenomenic and transient appearance. This contemplation gave these things, therefore, a superior dignity and reality, a superior ontological consistency. The difference between Platonism and Aristotelianism is of little importance for the purposes of this analysis. For Plato, essences constituted a separate, transcendent world; for Aristotle, the intelligible nucleus was immanent in the sensible world; but in both cases it was a matter of moving from immediate phenomenality to a deeper and more permanent stratum.

Interpretation (hermeneia) of appearances consisted of this ascent in ontological level, from the phenomenic entity to the essential being. The term hermeneia derives from the name of the god Hermes, or Mercury, the psychopomp god, that is, “guide of souls”, charged with leading them up and down through the worlds or planes of reality, from the sensible to the intelligible, from the particular, transitory and apparent to the universal and stable. This essentially constituted the interpretative posture of the Greek philosopher.

3. What is the essential difference between the contemplative — or interpretative — attitude and the transformative attitude, that is, between theoria and praxis?

3.1. Theoria, by elevating the object to the level of its idea, essence, or archetype, captures the scheme of possibilities from which this object is the particular and concrete manifestation. For example, the archetype of “horse”, the possibility “horse”, can manifest itself in black or spotted horses, Arabian, Percheron or Mangalarga, riding or working horses, etc. It can manifest itself in prosaic cart horses or in famous and almost personalized horses like Alexander’s horse. It can manifest itself in mythical beings that “partake in horse-ness”, like Pegasus or the unicorn, each one, in turn, containing a bundle of symbolic meanings and intentions. In short, reason, by investigating the being of the object, elevates the latter to its superior nucleus of possibilities, rescuing it from its empirical accidentality and restoring, so to speak, its “eternal” sense. The “practical” consequence of this is portentous. By knowing an archetype, I know not only what the thing is currently and empirically, but everything it could be, all the latency of possibilities it can manifest and that insinuates itself behind its singular manifestation, located in space and time.

Praxis, on the contrary, transforms the thing, that is, actualizes one of these possibilities, immediately excluding all the others. For example, a tree. If I investigate the object “tree” to capture its archetype, I become aware of what it is, what it could be, what it can mean to me, to others, on other planes of reality etc. But if I transform it into a chair, it can no longer transform itself into a table or bookcase, much less a tree. From a chair, it can now only transform itself into an old chair, and then into trash.

3.2. For the philosopher, therefore, the phenomenon, the immediate sensible appearance is above all a sign or symbol of a being. For the man of praxis, the appearance is always raw material for desired transformations. Theoretical investigation inserts the being into the body of possibility that contains it, and explains and integrates it into the total sense of reality. Praxis, on the contrary, limits its possibilities, realizing one of them, with no way back. For theoria, the entity is primarily its form, in the Aristotelian sense, that is, what makes it what it is; for praxis, the entity is primarily matter, that is, what makes it possible for it to become something other than what it is. This opposition should not be confused with that of the “static” and the “dynamic”, because internal dynamism is part of the form (for example, the form of the seed is the complete plant in which it has the power to transform itself). More accurately, it can be said that theoria is interested in what an entity is in itself and for itself, and praxis is interested in what it is not, in the secondary being, sometimes in the false being or semblance of being that we can manufacture with it. It was in this sense that the Hindu scriptures denied that action could bring knowledge of any kind. Action produces only transformation, flow of impressions, illusion, from which we emerge only through later reflexive retreat, by the “denial” of theoretical and critical action consummated: the philosophical spirit, latent power in homo sapiens, only actualizes as reflection on the disillusionments of homo faber.74

3.3. If praxis requires some theory, this theory will no longer deal with the nature of being, it will not try to investigate what the being is in the body of total reality, but only what it can transform into in the next instant, not by its own and internal dynamism, but by the force of human intervention. It will no longer be a theory of the object, but a theory of the action it can suffer. It is not a theory of being, but a theory of praxis. As praxis is always human action, then every object will always and only be viewed under the category of passion, that is, the transformative actions it can suffer. It no longer matters what the horse or the tree is in the total system of reality, but what, within the circle of my immediate interests, I can do with the horse or with the tree, regardless of what they are. For example, I can burn the tree or eat the horse meat: if the theory respected above all the ontological and even physical integrity of the object, praxis begins by denying it, that is, by not admitting that the object is what it is and by demanding that it transform into something else: it does not interpret, but transforms.

3.4. Of course, this is not about condemning praxis in the name of a utopian contemplative life, but only about restoring the sense of a hierarchy of values that seems to be inherent to the structure of the human individual. Practice, which transforms, is essentially directed at means: as all transformation aims at a result or end, the object it focuses on is always and necessarily a means, just a means. The earth that man plows is a means or instrument, so is the sheep he fattens and kills, and the tree he cuts down. Work, like capital, is a means or an instrument. That which is a means or instrument does not matter or worth by itself, but by something else: the means or instrument is an intermediary, a transition or passage, that which at a certain point on the path will be abandoned to give way to ends. Man’s universal tendency to economize effort shows the subjection of means to ends.

Conversely, what is an end or value in itself is not an object of transforming praxis, but of contemplation, of love. As Miguel de Unamuno said, "the tram is useful because it serves to take me to my beloved’s house; but what is she for me?". I can, of course, degrade her to a means or instrument of my pleasure, but in this case, I no longer love her, but pleasure itself.75 The loved object, if it truly is, is not a means, but an end. We do not want to change it, transform it, use it for something else, but to enjoy its presence without altering it, without changing it at all.76 On the contrary, when contemplating and loving we are the ones who transform: “The lover is transformed into the beloved”.

So, there are aspects of reality that can only be known by praxis, others that can only be known by theoria. But praxis necessarily proceeds by the negation of the object, by its reduction to means and instrument, and theoria by the affirmation of its fullness and its value as an end. It is obvious, then, that:

3.4.1. There is a different dosage in the combination of theory and practice for the knowledge of various types of beings: what is for me a means and instrument, I can only know it by using it; what for me is an end and value in itself, I know it to the extent that I contemplate it, that I love it, that I defend its ontological integrity against any attempt to transform it into something else. Van Gogh knew brushes and paints to the extent that he used them and, using them, wore them out. But I know Van Gogh’s paintings to the extent that they are kept intact for my contemplation.

3.4.2. There is no pure praxis or pure contemplation in the world of physical beings. There are only dosages, according to the gradation of the value of the ends and the opportunity of the means. Only the supreme end can be the object of pure contemplation. Only the totally despicable object, without its own ontological consistency or any value in itself, can be the target of pure praxis. Both of these limits are metaphysical, and are never reached in the world of real experience.

3.4.3. However, there is a clear hierarchical distinction: contemplation, as an objective and purpose, takes precedence over practice, which ultimately only serves to remove the obstacles that separate us from contemplative enjoyment. Man does not transform what pleases him, but what displeases him: he engages in contemplation out of taste, and in practice out of necessity (not to mention, of course, that in practice itself there is a playful and contemplative element, which makes work enjoyable in itself and gives it a value independent of its practical profit).

3.4.4. From all this, it follows that to establish practice as the foundation and supreme value of knowledge is to establish the reign of means, disregarding the ends; it is to invert the direction of all human action and deny the ontological consistency of reality. It is to look at reality in its entirety — including man and his History, as well as the set of individual actions practiced by human beings — as a vast instrument without any purpose. It is to transform the universe into a huge banana-straightening machine.

Herein, already in Marx, lies the root of the nietzscheanization of the left, in which many theorists, scandalized, will see a betrayal of Marxism. The philosophy of praxis contains in its womb, hidden but no less potent, the negation of the sense of reality, the apology of the absurd. It is obvious that it is an unconscious Epicurean legacy, which was redeemed when, after the global crisis of Marxism, the leftist intelligentsia massively surrendered to a kind of pseudo-heroism of nonsense, proud to continue defending social ideals that, in a world without meaning, can only consist in a Nietzschean affirmation of the will to power, in a gratuitous and arbitrary clinamen that man, out of pedantry or ennui, opposes to the arbitrary and gratuitous clinamen of atoms.77 A talented writer, John Anthony West, compared the hard materialist to a John Wayne of philosophy, unperturbed on the saddle, looking with utmost indifference at the random movements of atoms in the plain and despising the crying of those weaklings who need a sense for life. The lone rider in the desert of the absurd synthesizes Marx, Nietzsche, and Epicurus.

3.5. There is a curious parallelism between the notions of object-of-theory and object-of-praxis, on the one hand, and, on the other, use-value and exchange-value. Use value is, in a certain way, a property, a quality inherent to the object, it is part of its ontological consistency; whereas exchange value is accidental, as Marx himself affirms: it depends on historical circumstances that have nothing to do with the nature of the object. One of the moral criticisms that Marxism directs at capitalism is that in it, the exchange value ends up devouring the use value until it makes it disappear, until all objects no longer exist except as “commodities”, according to the famous boutade of Bertolt Brecht: “I don’t know what it is. I only know how much it costs”. It is the same as saying that capitalism absorbs the category of substance into the category of passion. Whether capitalism really does this or whether it is just a figure of speech, a hyperbole, is something to investigate. But that in Karl Marx’s philosophy this inversion occurs, is obvious. Only in this case, Marx’s criticism of capitalism loses objective value, reducing itself to mere projection: Marx censures in capitalism a defect that is not necessarily in capitalism, but that is in the subconscious or unconscious mental schemes of Karl Marx himself.

3.6. Being a theory of action, and not of the object, praxis will not recognize, in the object, any aspect other than its immediate transformability. Without knowing what a tree is, I can however use the wood to make a table or shelf. Praxis, in short, will deny the world, the phenomena, their own ontological consistency, knowable by man: it will fluidify all individual essences into raw material for praxis and will result, in the end, in a new and more radical type of subjective idealism: the objective world is nothing more than the scenario of praxis. The theory will say nothing about the objects as they are, but only as they can become under the action of the hammer and the forge. It would be interesting to investigate how it is possible to reconcile this with the alleged Marxist “materialism”; for Marxism reveals itself rather as a subjectivist idealism, in the strict and almost Fichtean sense, with the only difference being that it has as its subject not the individual, but historical humanity, before whose praxis the natural universe — the “matter” — loses all substantiality to be reduced to mere raw material for human action, relegating nature to the status of ancilla industriae. It is this character of collective subjectivist idealism that gives Marxism its tremendous illusory power that intoxicates and perverts, and from which even men of high intelligence sometimes allow themselves to be contaminated.

However, when I consider how narrow the strip of the material universe reached by human action is (only the surface of the Earth, and not even the whole of it), and unlimited the extension of celestial worlds that we cannot transform and can only contemplate, then I ask if the theory of praxis is not a monstrous universalizing amplification of a local and terrestrial phenomenon — collectively subjective —, and if before the immensity of the cosmos the “theoretical” attitude is not the most sensible.

From the theory of praxis also comes the idea — today almost a dogma — that science arises a posteriori from a rationalization of technique, that is, from action: man does not create science through contemplation, but through the manipulation of objects and their transformation into something else. It would then remain to explain how, in almost all civilizations, one of the sciences that first develops and quickly reaches perfection is always precisely astronomy, whose objects are at a distance too great to be “transformed”, and which therefore man can only contemplate. (A fanatical practitioner could object that astronomy developed for navigation purposes, but this is pure nonsense, because refined astronomy is already found among peoples who had nothing to do with navigation, such as the Mayans.) This chronological and structural priority of astronomy is highlighted by Plato,78 who sees the explanation for the origin of all sciences in the contemplation of the regularity and rationality of the movements of the stars. The Marxist explanation, on the other hand, only stands up through a brutal falsification of the chronological order. For it to acquire some plausibility in the eyes of men, it was necessary for bourgeois society to first reduce to servant of technique and practical utility an intellectual activity in which for millennia its practitioners had seen an end in itself. The practitioner interpretation of the origin and meaning of science is a gross projection that the bourgeois makes of his own criteria and values on the mentality of previous epochs, which have become incomprehensible to him.79

§18 The materialist tradition

We have just understood the affinity between Marx and Epicurus. It is a negative affinity, built upon a shared hatred of contemplative intelligence and a common intent to subjugate it to fictitious practical interests: the practical interest in establishing a fictitious social justice, the practical interest in achieving fictitious psychological well-being.

However, Pessanha’s ideology still appears to be an amalgamation of heterogeneous and incompatible elements. Beyond the mere community of hatred and illusions, how can we reconcile the Marxist philosophy of History with Epicurus' cosmology? How could a rationally ordered sense of historical causes proposed by Marxism emerge from a chaotic and loose universe where matter is not governed by any laws? In the Epicurean chaos, every action is doomed to failure, and man has no way out but to take refuge in dreams, among the roses of the Garden. How can one transform the world by fleeing from it? How can revolutionary praxis be reconciled with Epicurean evasionism? In this regard, the Soviet orthodoxy was quite lucid in condemning the new trends in Planck’s and Heisenberg’s physics as irrationalist—and therefore, bourgeois, decadent, and reactionary—condemnation that would apply a fortiori to Epicurus' physics if it were discussed at that time. The CPSU would not be foolish enough to organize the world revolutionary movement based on a physical foundation made of soap bubbles.

As for Marx himself, the idea of an impossible reconciliation never crossed his mind. After his youthful interest in Epicurus' physics (the subject of his dissertation), he made sure not to retain any ostensible residue of it in the fully developed dialectical materialism, which, as we have seen, owed much to it. Without ridding himself of the Epicurean root of his thought, Marx concealed it so well that it only reappeared in the midst of the crisis of Marxism. 80

Marx’s discretion was wise: having an Epicurean past is like having a mother in the red-light district. It is understandable that Marx’s critics may point out this detail. But why should a thinker with Marxist sympathies want to touch on this subject? Out of mere biographical interest? It is not plausible that Pessanha sought to “rescue” Epicurus merely because the philosopher from Trier had engaged with Epicureanism during his academic formation. No, Pessanha was not merely a collector of relics. If he sought a synthesis between Marx and Epicurus, an emphasis that Marx himself did not show, it was certainly because he saw between them a more interesting and, let’s say, more “practical” affinity.

The affinity he saw is not only the one I pointed out in the previous paragraph; it lies primarily in the word “materialism.” At a certain point in the lecture, Pessanha declared himself committed to reconstructing something like a “materialist tradition” embedded in the history of Western thought. This is very revealing, as only this intention could explain why he emphasized philosophers of third or fourth rank, such as Helvétius, Dégerando, Condillac, as the editors of the series Os Pensadores, while omitting giants like Brentano, Jaspers, or Dilthey. 81 The former are materialists, and their neglect obscured the continuity of the desired “tradition,” making materialism appear as it is: a mere occasional and discontinuous counterpoint to the spiritualist mainstream, which runs continuously from Plato to Husserl. To give materialism at least an appearance of continuity, it was necessary to fill the gaps in history caused by the oblivion that had befallen, over the centuries, a diverse collection of litterateurs and pseudo-philosophers and place them in their respective chronological niches, alongside the real philosophers whose dialogue forms the unity of the History of Philosophy over time. A certain degree of scientific scrupulousness, which certainly had not completely died in Pessanha, must have prevented him from blatantly falsifying history, leveling everyone up, and therefore, he opted for the vague and noncommittal designation of “thinkers” to encompass both philosophers and the quasi-philosophers, leveling them down. Even then, if the figure of a materialist tradition did not emerge as Pessanha desired, at least the dominant line of traditional spiritualism appeared more attenuated and discontinuous than it is in reality.

The affinity that allowed Pessanha, with many stitches and patches, to synthesize Marx and Epicurus is the same that underlies the claims of a “materialist tradition.” It is the affinity of a word, not a concept. “Matter,” as elastic as it may be, cannot simultaneously accommodate the arbitrariness of Epicurean atoms and the rigid obedience to Newtonian determinism demanded by all contemporary materialists of Marx. The only synthesis between indeterminism and Newton is the fiercely idealistic one outlined by Heisenberg, Pauli, Bohr, and a whole gang of abominable spiritualists. Curiously, only among the spiritualists is there any consensus regarding matter; the materialists, perhaps considering it divine, insist on worshiping it each in their own way.

A synthesis based on the apparent unity of a word, under which hides a multiplicity of mutually incompatible concepts, is merely an appearance of synthesis, just as the unity of the materialist tradition, based on this word, is pure pretense. But, for a master of rhetoric, words and appearances are everything. An appearance that seems plausible as a concept, an appearance that persuasively presents unanimity, may be of no philosophical or historiographic value. However, when wielded by a rhetorician, they are sufficient to stir powerful emotional waves and to rally the masses against a common enemy, sufficiently undefined, phantasmagorical, and elastic to encompass, in one reactionary monster figure, Plato and Mr. Collor de Mello, memories of the military dictatorship and St. Augustine’s philosophy of history, prevailing corruption and the historiographic tradition that preferred Aristotle to Epicurus. Pessanha thus made his lecture a political act in the most acute and effective sense of the word: the unity of the masses against a common enemy, suitably vague and elastic to embrace, in a single reactionary monster figure, Plato and Mr. Collor de Mello, memories of the military dictatorship and St. Augustine’s philosophy of history, prevailing corruption, and the historiographic tradition that preferred Aristotle to Epicurus. Pessanha did not present any theory, define any concept, lay any foundation, or do any of those things that philosophers typically do, and, strictly speaking, he said absolutely nothing identifiable. But he certainly left a profound impression. And what rhetorician doesn’t know that men are not moved by concepts but by impressions? The man moved by impressions does not know where he is heading, and that is why the science of producing impressions is carefully cultivated by all those who have the ambition to lead the people.

“Matter” is not a concept—except in the conventional and instrumental sense found in physics books, without any ontological pretense—and materialism is not a doctrine, except in the negative sense of a collection of diverse and contradictory opinions. But matter is a symbol, and materialism is a force. Not a physical force but a historical force, made of impressions and emotions that lead to actions. As there is no conceptually identifiable “matter”—again, in an instrumental sense perfectly compatible with the spiritualist doctrines embraced, incidentally, by most great physicists—the unity of the materialist tradition cannot be forged based on the defense of matter. If such unity exists, it is not a unity in favor but a unity against: the negative unity of those who, unable to affirm anything in common, join hands in the solidarity of denial: the denial of spirit. If there is a materialist tradition, it consists of nothing other than the fortuitous amalgamation of opposing denials by different individuals and an indefinite number of reasons against any and every affirmation of spirit. It is like the holes in Swiss cheese compared to its continuous density. To claim that this tradition exists substantially, and not just as an artificial sum of diverse denials, is to want to physically separate and place, side by side in distinct places in space, the total mass of cheese and the total mass of holes. If we simply consider the notorious fact that Plato and Aristotle were absorbed into Christian philosophy and that all the important philosophers in the West, from Augustine to Hegel, were Christians—without any exception—we will see that Pessanha’s claim can only be understood as either hallucinatory delusion or deliberate fraud. To compose a materialist tradition with fragments of opinions from litterateurs and pseudo-philosophers and make it the guiding line of continuity in human thought, reducing spiritualism to a fortuitous collection of exceptions, is, without exaggeration, the most astonishing falsification of history ever undertaken by a leftist militant, since the Soviet Academy of Sciences grafted an unknown person’s head onto Trotsky’s shoulders in photos of scenes from the October Revolution in the Soviet Encyclopedia, making Stalin retroactively the military commander of the uprising.

Once united Marx and Epicurus by the holy bonds of hatred for theoretical intelligence and the primacy of practical interest, Pessanha begins to make sense. In the realm of illusions, there is no essential hostility between personal interest and collective interest: within the same soul, Epicurean evasionism and socialist utopianism can coexist harmoniously, united in the common struggle against the principle of objective knowledge and the common commitment to replace reality instead of understanding it.

But there is still an obscure point. Marx and Epicurus, differing in terms of scale of transformation—social in one case, individual in the other—can reach an agreement because they have a common principle, at least in appearance: materialism. More precisely, two principles: materialism and the primacy of practical interest, the depreciation of theoretical intelligence. But how to reconcile materialism with Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the New Age movement? Philosophically, it seems impossible. The New Age adheres massively to Eastern or pseudo-Eastern metaphysics, which for the Marxist are mere feudal ideology and for the Epicurean a despicable enslavement of man to the gods. As for NLP, it draws inspiration from a radicalized, hypertrophic Kantianism that sees the world as a mere projection of our thoughts—an hypothesis that Marxism rejects as bourgeois idealism:

"Human beings receive and interpret information provided by the five senses. Through various processes of generalization, distortion, and filtering, the brain transforms these electrical signals into an internal representation. The experience you have of an event is not exactly what happened, but the personalized internal representation of what happened. This filtering explains the immense variety of human perception… ‘The map is not the territory,’ this is one of the fundamental ideas of NLP…"82

From this Kantian observation, however, the theorist of NLP draws a conclusion that leads straight to a pragmatism tinged with Nietzschean influences:

"Since we don’t know how things really are and we only know the representation we make of them, why not represent them in a way that empowers us? No matter how horrific the situation, you can always represent it in a way that gives you power."83

From the depreciation of our cognitive capacity, an apology for our power to act is derived. Describing man as a blind animal, separated from reality by the insurmountable wall of solipsism, the theorist of NLP does not draw the depressing logical consequence that a being constituted in this way is doomed to failure in all his actions, but rather the surprisingly uplifting conclusion that man can act and succeed precisely because he does not see the ground he treads on. Effective action does not depend on a correct view of reality, but on a fantasy of power.

Can this be reconciled with Marxism? Yes and no. Not with the Marxism that was in Karl Marx’s declared intentions: an objective science that would, for the first time, overcome a long series of ideological distortions dictated by class interests and, by identifying with the interests of the class that sums up the interests of all humanity—the proletariat—would provide a realistic and universally valid view of human society. If this science is possible, NLP is false, at least in its claim of universality: only the bourgeoisie exchanges the real world for a subjective projection; the proletariat sees reality. In this sense, NLP could be viewed, from the perspective of orthodox Marxism—and as such it would necessarily be qualified by Marxist criticism a few years ago—as bourgeois subjective idealism. Its success among entrepreneurs and executives would be alleged as confirmation of this diagnosis. In this sense, the hostility between NLP and Marxism is open and irreparable.

On the other hand, NLP does not waste time interpreting the world—it is concerned with transforming it. To enthrone as a valid representation not one that accurately describes reality, but one that gives us the power to act in it—or at least a dynamic illusion of power that gives us the courage to fight for power—is a proposition of a pragmatic nature.84 However, as Gramsci aptly noted, pragmatism can perfectly coexist with Marxism to the extent that both turn their backs on the description of reality and emphasize its transformation. Both equally confuse theory and practice: pragmatism, mixing logic and psychology—the study of the real causes that produce true or false thought with the ideal and formal requirements of true thought;85 Marxism, confusing ideology with sociology—the expression of class interest with the description of the objective state of society.86 Marx never realized the contradiction between his ideal of an objective, universally valid science and his mixing of theory and practice. In fact, any practical application of a theory is only possible to the extent that the boundaries between theory and practice are rigorously demarcated within the theory itself. A theory that allows itself to be contaminated by “practice” in the course of theoretical investigation will never be able to determine whether its results were found in the external reality or produced and grafted there by the practical action of the scientist-activist, an ambiguous and two-faced being who does not distinguish between knowledge and the issuance of self-fulfilling prophecies.87 This mixture, which rhetorically has the allure of a protest against a supposed academicism disconnected from “life,” serves only to enchant restless young people who seek in theories a vain confirmation of their desires and aspirations, not valid knowledge, much less knowledge applicable in practice. It serves neither to create an approximately correct description of reality, nor even less to develop predictions that underpin practical action. The absolute inability of Marxist theorists to predict the course of history, their depressing succession of gross errors over more than a hundred years—beginning with Marx himself, who assumed that the socialist revolution should occur in Germany or England, in an advanced country and not in a feudal society like Russia—shows that the power of Marxism is not the material and practical power of an applied science, of a technique, of a “rational action according to ends,” as Weber would say, of a Comtean prévoir pour pouvoir, but rather the enticing and hypnotic power of a fantasy, of a pseudoprophetic hallucination, capable of moving the world, but never where it intends to; capable of inducing the masses and intellectuals to action, but not of bringing the action to a successful conclusion; capable of disrupting a capitalist economy, but not of building the supposed socialism; capable of unleashing causes, but not of directing them towards the desired effects. It is an entropic force that agitates, shakes, and frightens the world without producing anything but pain and loss, but precisely because of this, it exerts an irresistible attraction on men, a self-destructive compulsion enveloped in delusions of grandeur, like Nero amid the flames of Rome. Facilis est descensus averni. The affinity with NLP is evident: no matter how horrific the results of the revolutionary struggle may be, the left is always capable of “representing them in a way that gives it power”—the power to fall indefinitely and drag humanity along with it.

With the New Age, reconciliation is no longer so easy. First, because reaching an agreement with a “bag of cats” is not child’s play. Spokespersons and critics of the New Age are in agreement about the general discord that reigns within the movement: “Within the movement, there is no unanimity on how to define it, nor is there significant cohesion that would allow us to call it a movement,” writes the New Age apologist (and commercializer, like most of them), Jeremy P. Tarcher.88 At the other end, Protestant critic Russel Chandler: "Movements of the New Age (in the plural) is a much more apt description. The New Age has no comprehensive superstructure."89

Second, communism, be it Russian, Chinese, or Cuban, is as far from the spirit of the New Age as the U.S. Army’s Discipline Regulation. It is also difficult for someone to believe in the influence of the stars and in the class struggle as the engines of History at the same time.

However, these very incompatibilities already indicate something about the positive beliefs that outline the pattern of an implicit unanimity behind the stunning variety of New Age orientations.

  1. No one there cares about hierarchy, order, or obedience for rational reasons. Authority is admitted, but only of a charismatic type that people obey precisely because they do not understand; bureaucratic or traditional authority—in the Weberian sense—is not accepted.

  2. For the same reason, a doctrine based on rationally valid evidence is not accepted. A doctrine that is rationally proven excludes its own negation, and this is anathema to the New Age: no doctrine has the right to be truer than another_. Todo es igual, nada es mejor._

  3. With no rational argumentation or hierarchy of priorities, the only valid criterion is the “feeling of participation,” which differentiates individuals integrated into the new wave from the pagans, not yet touched by the spirit of the horde.

  4. Therefore, the mindset of the New Age is simultaneously individualistic and collectivist. Individualistic, by removing the individual from rational dialogue. Faced with the appeal of reason, which is the same for everyone, the anarchic individualist withdraws into a shell, seeking refuge in the protection of his “inner guru,” which whispers to him unutterable truths, above and beyond all rational confrontation. On the other hand, what this guru whispers, instead of isolating him forever from the world, integrates him into the festive horde of those who have received identical messages through the “interior path” of radio and TV, films, and shows. After all, the guru’s voice surrounds us everywhere. The “interiority” of the New Age leaves no room for a single moment of reflection and contemplation.90 By merging the inner feelings of the disciple into the emotional atmosphere that surrounds him, it eliminates the gap, the distance between the self and the world, without which any objective-critical examination is impossible. Not that it is against all critical thinking. On the contrary, it fosters it, as long as it turns against forms of authority that are of no interest to the movement: the bureaucratic-rational authority of science, the traditional authority of parents or customary religion. It often produces realistic and pertinent criticism in these areas. However, as soon as the disciple crosses the threshold of the temple and enters the magic circle of charismatic authority, not only criticism but sometimes all thought is rejected as demonic temptations. Thought is reduced to the status of a firearm, and the right to bear arms is only granted outside the walls, in the profane realm of outer darkness, for selective use against heretics and unbelievers.

At this point, the arrangement of ideas in José Américo Motta Pessanha’s mind starts to become plausible. The rejection of rational proof, the mysticism of a pseudo-collective interiority, the insolent revolt against the authority of the past, and the hypnotic submission to a new authority are common to Epicureanism, Marxism (at least in its modern Gramscian version), and the New Age, including NLP. With a little elasticity, all reconciliations are possible.

But one disturbing doubt may still linger in the reader’s mind. The New Age, in general, draws inspiration from spiritualistic motives. It has circulated ideas such as reincarnation, karma, angels and fairies, and astral journeys. How can all of this, even superficially, be reconciled with the professed materialism of Marx and Epicurus? As much as secondary affinities may bring them together, materialism and spiritualism remain, after all, the example par excellence of irreducible opposition. Eppur…

Book IV – The arms and the cross

Chapter 7 – Spiritual materialism

“O abismo era metódico, seu método
audaz, mas um se foi e o outro esvaiu-se
como mais um suspiro sem remédio.
Já o vazio, o mais límpido exercício,
era um puro palácio aritmético…
Mas e a vida? Ah, a vida era esse vício!”

– BRUNO TOLENTINO

(“The abyss was methodical, its method
bold, but one is gone and the other faded
like yet another sigh without remedy.
The emptiness, the clearest exercise,
was a pure arithmetic palace…
But life? Ah, life was this addiction!”

— BRUNO TOLENTINO)

§19 The divinization of space (I): Poor Bantus

In all major spiritual traditions, without exception, some ternary division of the strata of reality is found, such as Deus, Homo, Natura (God, Human, Nature) in Christianity or Heaven-Earth-Human (Tien-Ti-Jen) in Taoism.

To this division of the whole correspond, for the countless parts, aspects, and secondary planes, as many subdivisions, also ternary, that echo and reverberate to each other according to an infinity of scales and points of view. The Christian Trinity — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — corresponds, in the microcosm of human constitution, to the ternary body, soul, spirit. The soul, in turn, is vegetative, appetitive, intellective.

In the Chinese tradition, the ternary division of the world mimics another higher ternary: that of the supreme metaphysical principles Yang, Yin and Tao, which can be translated, without greater esoteric pedantries, as Form, Matter and Proportion, as long as it is understood that a translation is not an explanation. The three principles, as they govern the entirety of being, manifest themselves in each of the small facts that in inexhaustible multitude make up the succession of cosmic life, which is why the ternary step is the pace of all actions and mutations. The I Ching, “Book of Changes”, presents a miniature model of all possible mutations: from ternary to ternary, adding them two by two,91 the sacred book of the Tchou dynasty closes the cycle by reaching the number 64: the following cycles repeat the scheme.92

Inverting only the order of succession to Heaven-Human-Earth, the Chinese triad corresponds exactly to the Greek ternary Logos-Ethos-Physis, where Logos is the sphere of metaphysical principles, Ethos the human world of indecision and relative freedom, Physis the repetitive order of sensible nature. Plato, when defining man as an intermediary between beast and god, was rigorously Chinese. It is not surprising, therefore, that Aristotle, in describing the order of discursive thought, found that it walks in a ternary step, drawing a third from two propositions and so on, and that the complete combination added up, in the end, to 64 possible ternaries without repetition: syllogistics is the “Book of Changes” of reasoning. And, indeed, why should the sphere of human reason function differently from the supreme reason that orders reality as a whole? “Logic,” says Schuon, “is an ontology of the microcosm of human reason.”

To the Hindu triad, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, which express roughly the ideas of creation, conservation, and transformation respectively, correspond to as many ternaries in the cosmic and human sphere, for example, the movements of the cosmos, Tamas, Rajas and Sattwa (fall, expansion, rise), or the states of consciousness — wakefulness, dream and deep sleep —, through which man recedes from the sensible manifestation to the metaphysical principle of all things. The ternary step between the world and the origin is marked by the monosyllable Aum, whose letters correspond, in order, to the three states mentioned.

The faithful Muslim,93 when praying, goes through these same stages, symbolized in the three positions of liturgical prayer — standing, seated, and prostrate —, which personify man before the world, man before himself, and man nullified before divine infinity. Here also three letters indicate the path: A, D, and M, which compose the word Adam (Arabic generally omits in writing the intermediate vowels), that is, Adam, the primordial man, model of the species. The design of the letters allows for visualizing the three positions of prayer:

The three stages correspond, mutatis mutandis, to the three bands of time: temporality, or irreversible succession, perenniality or aeviternity, cyclical time, which elapses but returns, returning intact at the end the possibilities that were at the beginning; and eternity — as Boethius defined it, “full and simultaneous possession of all its moments”, tota simul et perfecta possessio. The notion of triple time is found, perfectly equal, in all spiritual traditions, and also in the structure of ancient languages. In Arabic, there is a verb tense for actions conceived as finished (at any chronological time), one for actions in fieri, another for actions conceived regardless of termination or continuation. They correspond, structurally, to time, perennial continuity, to eternity. The same is seen in Greek or Hebrew.94

The ternary of worlds, in short, seems to apprehend, if not an ontological law, truth embedded in the very constitution of being, at least a “constant of the human spirit”, a universal human tendency to face being as if it were so constituted. For this reason, what surprises in it is not the ubiquity of its presence in the great religious traditions, but its absence in some of the small ones. Certain tribal cultures seem to ignore it completely, or have a nebulous and distant idea of it, a residue of an old forgotten doctrine. Mircea Eliade noted in tribes of Africa and Polynesia the weakening of the sense of metaphysical eternity, parallel to a hypertrophic proliferation of cosmic deities or divinized natural forces — a swelling of the perennial, which swallowed or concealed the sense of eternity:

"The Semang of the Malaga Peninsula also know a supreme being, Kari… He created all things except the Earth and man, which are the work of Ple, another deity that is subordinate to him… The fact that Kari was not the creator of the Earth and man is significant: it reveals to us a vulgar form of the transcendence and passivity of the supreme deity, too far away from man to satisfy his countless religious, economic and vital needs…

The same is true in most African populations: the great sky god, the supreme being, all-powerful creator, only plays an insignificant role in the tribe’s religious life. He is too far away or too kind to need a proper worship… The Yorubas of the Slave Coast believe in a sky god called Olorum, who, after beginning the creation of the world, entrusted the task of finishing and governing it to an inferior god, Obatala. As for him, Olorum permanently withdraws from earthly and human affairs…

Nzambi, of the Bantus, is also a great sky god who withdrew from worship…

The same happens among the Angonis, who know a supreme being but worship the ancestors; among the Tumbukas, for whom the creator is too distant and too great ‘to be interested in the vulgar affairs of men’; among the Wahehes, who imagine the supreme being Ngurubi as creator and almighty, but know that it is the spirits of the dead who exercise a true vigilance over worldly matters and to them they offer regular worship…

The Bantus say: ‘God, after creating man, never wanted to know anything more about him’. And the Pygmies repeat: ‘God has left us’"95

It is understandable that this state of mind spreads in small tribes, perhaps remnants of ancient fragmented African empires, and marked by an immemorial sequence of defeats and deprivations — the repeated trauma of unanswered prayers. But when the highly civilized intellectual of a rich and victorious nation says that “God is dead”, or that “God has left the phone off the hook”, or makes the “silence of God” the center of the theological concerns of his time, should we understand this as the expression of the feeling of an old scattered and decaying tribe?

The phenomenon is enigmatic. But first of all, we must not fall into the trap of interpreting the speeches of intellectuals as expressions of the dominant sentiment among the populations of the wealthy Western countries. A century after Nietzsche proclaimed the “death of God”, no less than 56 percent of Americans (official statistics) attend Sunday worship, Protestant or Catholic, and it’s not to pray to ancestors or totemic trees. Nietzsche’s opinion for these people is mosquito poop. The “death of God” is, at most, an expression of a sentiment prevalent in intellectual circles — a relatively small tribe that, seeing itself excluded from power by the Bourgeois Revolution it helped to make, has every reason to feel scattered, isolated, separated from the meaning of life, abandoned by a God whose presence it itself strived, for three centuries, to tear from the hearts of men.

Secondly, the theory of the Deus otiosus, which the poor Bantu arrived at through a succession of disappointing experiences, was cheerfully proposed to Westerners in the 17th century by philosophers and scientists who believed they were discovering a new world — the world of mechanical laws that would explain nature and man without needing the “God hypothesis”. Two centuries later, when they discovered that this world was as stupid and unreasonable as any mechanical apparatus considered outside the intelligent purposes it serves, they could not simply say, with the innocence of the pygmy, that “God had moved away from them”. No: they were conscious of having expelled Him by their own will — hence, alongside the theory of the “death of God” emerged, in the same Viennese circle where it spread, also the doctrine of the Oedipus complex: in a civilization that for two millennia imagined God as a “Father”, the Oedipal guilt subsequent to the expulsion of the Father could not fail to cast its shadow over all the intellectual production of the era of atheism.96 That Freud explained by the ritual death of the Father the origin of religious feeling, and not its extinction, is a sign that the loss of the metaphysical dimension brings with it an inversion of the sense of proportions.

But, under another very important aspect, the reaction of the European intellectual to the “loss of God” was identical to that of the pygmy or the Bantu.

It is significant that the supreme deity disappeared from sight is replaced, in worship, by two types of subordinate deities: the gods of nature and the ancestors. It is the same as saying: gods of space, gods of time. The first, embedded in the landscape, spread out in nature, hidden in the forests and caves. The second, immersed in the past, hidden among the shadows of memory. Cult of things, cult of the dead.

Now, in the development of Western ideas, the starting signal for the generalization of atheism among intellectuals was, along with the theory of the Deus otiosus that retired the Almighty, also, and inseparably from it, the elevation of space and time to the condition of absolutes that replaced Him in office, invested ad hoc with divine prerogatives.97

§20 The divinization of space (II): The infinity of Nicholas of Cusa

“The worst of errors is always constituted by the Truth itself. To dogmatize about an original good is to deliver it demagogically to dispute. And dispute, that’s the devil” – HENRY MONTAIGU

This starts with Nicholas of Cusa. The modern mathematical conception of nature begins at the moment when Nicholas, investigating the properties of numerical and spatial infinity, believes he finds in it the same rational inapprehensibility that forced theologians, when they spoke of God, to resort to the language of paradoxes. Example: an object rotating in a circular orbit, passing through the ends of diameter A-B. If we increase its speed to infinity, it will be simultaneously at A and B. But an object that occupied all points of its path simultaneously would not be in motion, but rather stationary: the supreme speed coincides with complete immobility.

In the same way, in an infinite extension, there is no “near” or “far”: all distances are equivalent. Therefore, if the circle in the previous example had an infinite diameter, all its points would be equidistant from the circumference, and the circle would have infinite centers, or none.

Applying these arguments, Nicholas concluded that space is infinite, that time is infinite, that the universe has no geometric center and that, therefore, Ptolemy’s geocentric system was wrong. With this, he anticipated by way of philosophical deduction what Copernicus would later demonstrate by measurement and calculation.

But the real historical importance of his discovery is not in this. If the universe is infinite, then all the self-contradictory arguments according to which what is near is far, the big is small, the before is after, etc., which, before Nicholas’s intervention, applied exclusively to God. Faced with these paradoxes, human reason proved impotent and had to give way to another mode of knowledge, the learned ignorance, a kind of methodical naivety that allowed the philosopher to intuitively grasp the reality of these contradictions that reason repels. This is the real novelty: the science of nature rises to the status of a secret, supra-rational knowledge, which requires of the scientist an inner transformation, a metanoia, a transfiguration of intelligence. Since antiquity, the philosophical and religious tradition had always recognized the need for some superior type of cognitive act — an illumination, an infused science, an intellectual intuition —, but only to reach the knowledge of God and the supreme mysteries. To know nature, the natural light of reason was enough. Not that reason could grasp all the causes of natural phenomena. It only grasped what was rational in them — the chaotic residue of pure matter, it was admitted, was not an object of knowledge: if nothing was known about it, it was because there was nothing properly to know there. Well, with Nicholas, two essential changes occur. First, the knowledge of nature is elevated to the status of mystery and intellectual intuition is downgraded in function — instead of a path to God, it is the way to the knowledge of nature. Second: Nicholas not only admitted the existence of the unknowable residue in nature and justified it metaphysically (by the same type of reasoning), but recognized that the only result to be reached by Docta ignorantia would be the recognition of this unknowability. Well, here we have the most fearsome of Cusan paradoxes, because, by applying to nature a faculty superior to reason, we do not come to a better result than by the rational path — we only indefinitely extend our verification of nature’s inexhaustibility. It is clear that, from then on, science, following the paths opened by Nicholas of Cusa, could only evolve in the sense of 1st, extending quantitatively the knowledge of natural chaos, without significant increase of its rational understanding; 2nd, requiring for this purpose an increasingly greater “initiatic” effort, to always reach more and more the mere realization of human impotence to understand nature; 3rd, applying to this all human capacity for intellectual intuition, previously directed to the knowledge of God. Science thus becomes a kind of reversed initiation: it can only be practiced through a metanoia, but this metanoia does not lead to the knowledge of God, but rather to the indefinitely repeated experience of the unknowability of nature; not to the illuminating rapture in the face of divine simplicity, but to the dazzling of intelligence before cosmic complexity; not to unity with the Spirit that moves all things from within, but to the hypnotic pursuit of the multiplicity of matter that crumbles into a dust of hypotheses.

One can doubt the wisdom of this enterprise, but it is certain that this was, strictly, the path followed by the evolution of modern science. When today’s physicist calls for help from Taoist symbolism in search of an organizing principle for his science,98 or admits that, strictly speaking, the basic concepts of subatomic physics have no intelligible meaning and are mere descriptive arrangements (mathematical metaphors, to say it better), or advocates the legitimacy of rhetorical argumentation as scientific proof,99 we have to admit that the root of these defeats of scientific pretension was already in the project of Nicholas of Cusa.

It is true that in Nicholas the infinitude of space-time did not yet have the sense of a divinization:

"Nicholas of Cusa denies the finitude of the world and its enclosure by the celestial spheres. But he does not affirm its positive infinity; in fact he avoids… attributing to the Universe the qualification of ‘infinite’, which he reserves for God and only for God. His Universe is not infinite (infinitum) in the positive sense of this term, but ‘unbounded’ (interminatum), which only means that it has no limits and is not contained in the outer shell of the ‘spheres’ of the heavens…_"100

With this, he is automatically out of reach of the two basic and hardly answerable censures that the greatest critic of modernity, René Guénon, made to post-renaissance science: the confusion between infinite and indefinite, whose lethal consequences propagate to this day, and the loss of the fluid and ambiguous sense of cosmic manifestation. For, Koyré continues, the “unbounded” cosmic of Nicholas

"also means that he is not ‘terminated’ in his constituents, that is, that he lacks completely precision and rigorous determination… he is, in the full sense of the word, indeterminate_. That is why he can only be the object of a partial and conjectural science_".101

Nicholas is magnificently in harmony with the symbolism of the great spiritual traditions, for which the totality of sidereal nature is included in a zone of indeterminacy, the “intermediate world”, an area of transition between the sensible certainty of immediate earthly experience and the intellectual certainty of the first metaphysical principles. This zone corresponds, in the Chinese scheme, to “Man” (jen), unbounded and fickle, mediator between the “passive firmness” of the Earth and the “active firmness” of Heaven (which evidently here is not the visible sky, but the “divine action” that moves it); in the medieval microcosmic ternary, it corresponds to the soul, intermediary between body and spirit; in the Hindu ternary of cosmic movements, to Rajas, the expansive force that mediates between ascension and fall, and in the three states of consciousness, to the dream, intermediary between wakefulness and deep sleep. In the triple time scheme, the sidereal zone therefore corresponds to aeviternity, to cyclical time, which is neither the irreversible time of terrestrial factuality nor the simultaneity of the eternal, but the zone of archetypal history, the mundus imaginalis where heroes and gods of mythology perennially inhabit, neither physically real nor merely imaginary (hence the term imaginal).102 In the light of traditional symbolism, the project of an exact and rigorous science of the cosmos, as announced by mechanicism, seems as extravagant as calculating Penelope’s tears, prescribing carqueja tea for Prometheus’s liver or calculating the exact number of angels that fit on the head of a needle – a calculation that modern ideology, certainly in a retroprojection of its own guilt, attributed to medieval scholastics. Both in the philosophy of Nicholas and in all the Christian worldview that preceded him was well declared, in all letters, the principle of indeterminism, which, if taken into account by renaissance science, would have allowed it to reach the foundations of Planck and Heisenberg’s physics, sparing humanity three centuries of mechanistic delirium, with all its devastating repercussions in the field of biology, psychology, philosophy in general and even ethics and politics.

How was it possible, then, that the philosophy of Nicholas contributed, albeit involuntarily, to the advent of a science amputated from its metaphysical root? The answer is simple: the treasure that Nicholas preserved in the field of cosmology he wasted in the field of gnoseology, the theory of knowledge. Because intellectual intuition – the learned ignorance as Nicholas called it – is the highest human cognitive capacity; it is the gift of apodictic evidence, of indestructible, supra-rational certainty, and requires an object at its height. It only moves with full ease in the field of metaphysical principles, where it has yielded so much, over time, that it has gained the prestige of a divine spark at the apex of the human soul, and many philosophers, like Averroes, in a burst of praise, have come to identify it directly with the intelligence of God. Faced with an object that is known from the beginning to be slippery, undefined by nature, inexhaustibly inaccurate and changing, what more could the gift of certainty do than give us repeatedly, century after century, endless reasons for uncertainty, the increasingly secure proof of insecurity, the increasingly accurate measurement of the impossibility of accurately measuring anything? Intellectual intuition serves to give us evident and definitive truth, not the provisional measurement of changing appearances, for which sensations are sufficient, as long as they are refined. By turning to the world of sensations, intellectual intuition not only loses efficacy and dignity, but transforms physics into a substitute for metaphysics and the astronomical sky into a substitute for the spiritual sky:

"[The] cosmological conceptions of Nicholas of Cusa culminate in the bold transfer to the Universe of the pseudo-hermetic definition of God: ‘A sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere’"103.

In the ancient and medieval context, the science of cosmic nature was not an end in itself, but merely a transition from sensible knowledge to the sphere of supreme metaphysical principles. Cosmology was an “intermediate science” in the cognitive ascent, just as the soul is intermediate between body and spirit, perpetuity between time and the eternal, Man between Heaven and Earth. Hence the relatively secondary importance it had, in this context, the discussion of the laws of nature as such and taken outside their theological and metaphysical consequences. Knowledge of nature was valued mainly for its symbolic reverberations, for the glimpse it could give of an eternal and supracosmic reality. Just as a healthy man when he falls asleep, the spiritual seeker only crossed the turbulent and chaotic region of dreams in order to reach, as quickly as possible, the realm of deep sleep, where in the silence and darkness of the mind shone the Light and the Word of God. The twist operated by Nicolau caused the dispersion of the most noble human faculty in the thankless task of delimiting the limitless.

Once this ambition was awakened, all excesses, all fantasies, all unsuitable and even fraudulent devices were put to its service. The first, of course, was to amputate from the cosmic totality the non-mathematizable elements, replacing the nature given in experience with a set of schemes previously arranged to fit the intended molds, and which was given the name of “reality”. Reduced the object to its mathematical elements, it was “proven” that everything in it worked mathematically.

The second was to escape far from the common and current experience of humanity, conceiving the habit – or vice – of reasoning by “models”, by schemes of merely possible relations, fatally taking them afterwards as if they were reality itself, and already denying not just some data from the sensible world, but human experience in its totality.

The third was to banish to the world of impertinent curiosities all questions that did not find an immediate answer in the Pythagorean, or pseudo-Pythagorean, fantasy of a mathematized, rigorous, counted, weighed, measured and predicted world in all its details.

A print of the time shows how the imagination of the Renaissance scholar conceived the “spiritual world” to which he would have access when transcending the limits of the sensible (Fig. 1): the pilgrim evades the mundane “sphere”, abandoning trees and flowers, Sun and Moon, birds and stars, to penetrate the marvelous kingdom of the spirit, which consists of some miserable gear wheels hidden among cloud wisps. Beautiful exchange!

Figure 1 – Reproduced from Camille Flammarion, L’atmosphere: meteorologie populaire, Paris, 1888.

But the “disenchantment of the world”, which so many later noticed, lamenting or celebrating it, is only the aesthetic side, the surface of this great mutation in which the schematism of some dry formulas replaces the richness of the living world. More serious were its moral and cognitive effects:

"The destruction of the cosmos and the loss, by the Earth, of its central and therefore unique position, led man to lose his unique and privileged position in the theocosmic drama of Creation, in which he had been until then, at the same time, the central figure and the scenario. At the end of this evolution we find the silent and terrifying world of Pascal’s ‘libertine’, the senseless world of modern scientific philosophy. In the end we find nihilism and despair".104

This moral effect, however, does not only result, as it might seem at first glance, from the loss of flattering illusions sacrificed to the progress of knowledge. It results from the fact that the apparent progress, pretending to give man a more realistic view of his position in the cosmos, carried within it the destruction of all possibility of knowing the real, the annulment of the very principle of objective knowledge. Through the door of Cusan learned ignorance, science entered the irreversible path of a kind of mathematical self-hypnosis, which, forging the model of its own object, implicitly renounced to give us any explanation of the world of human experience, while arrogating the right to expel from the realm of respectable knowledge any other possible explanations. This mutation turned the entire scientific activity into a permanent begging-the-question, where the undemonstrable hypothesis admitted at the outset — the mathematical character of cosmic laws — is at the same time elevated to the supreme and sole criterion of validation of scientific knowledge. To be “scientific”, in this sense, is to conform to an initial hypothesis impossible to prove and refractory, on the other hand, to intuitive data and common sense. Seeking an approximation with this hypothesis is the only goal of all scientific research. As, moreover, the object on which the hypothesis is based is undefined and inexhaustible, the approximation can never come to an end nor even claim, at any moment, to be more certain than in the previous or subsequent moment.105 The “mathematical accuracy” of the scientific vision of nature thus ends up in the limitless ocean of pure fantasy, while, with pathological arrogance, it legislates on the reality or unreality of other knowledge, sometimes denying common sense, sometimes invalidating intuitive perceptions, sometimes revoking individual self-consciousness, ultimately exerting all around the domain that it cannot exert on itself, like the small child who, not having the power to clean his own backside, imagines he has the power to despotically force the nanny to do so. Science locks itself in an incommunicable solipsism, while claiming to legislate on the knowledge of the external world. The scientific worldview, in short, renounces giving us any knowledge of the real world of experience – replacing it with a roster of mathematical schemes – and demoralizes as mystical fantasy any other way of accessing this knowledge. Woe unto you, who neither enter nor allow entrance.

The new science had a numbing effect on all intelligences. So stupefied did the scholars imbued with learned ignorance become, that from spatial infinity they immediately deduced the denial of the centrality of the Earth in the cosmos, without realizing the fallacy of this reasoning. If the infinite has indifferently infinite centers or none, it is absurd to try to prove that a particular point is not the center. All that could correctly be deduced from spatial unboundedness is that space has self-contradictory properties for not being properly a reality, but only the symbol or appearance of a supra-spatial instance where the apparent contradictions are reconciled in the unity of the metaphysical infinite. Indeed, the entire cosmic manifestation is affected by contradictions, for the simple fact that it is composed only of aspects, cuts, reverberations and fragments that could not have in themselves, whether together or separately, the foundation of their own existence.

Interestingly, Aristotle had, with two millennia of anticipation, warned against the risks of an indiscriminate application of the mathematical method to the philosophy of nature. One of the achievements that Renaissance science boasts of is having refuted Aristotelian physics on a certain point: the circularity of planetary orbits. But if Aristotle was clearly wrong in this detail and even in many others, it was not wise to throw away, along with them, the theoretical and methodological framework of his Physics, clearly superior, in realism and depth, to the unreserved Platonism of Renaissance physicists. Aristotle believed, in fact, there to be an irrational and unknowable residue in nature, inherent to the very constitution of matter — in which the subsequent evolution of science has not ceased to agree with him, albeit reluctantly and without admitting it in public; and he concluded that the demonstrative-mathematical method could only account for immaterial realities — of pure logical-ideal relations, we would say today in Husserlian language —, and not for sensible reality.106 By seemingly rejecting Aristotle, Renaissance science agreed with him fundamentally, insofar as, to be able to mathematize physics, it had to distance itself more and more from sensible reality until it completely replaced it with mathematical models. In this sense, the modern scientist who proclaims that Renaissance physics refuted Aristotle simply commits intellectual dishonesty.

The substitution of the world of experience by mathematical models brought with it the mania for uniformity, for geometric simplification which, to sustain the illusion of the perfect mechanism, needed to exclude, erase, or at least hide everything that was different, divergent, irregular, or strange. The geometric spirit marks the classical age in all its dimensions: from scientific philosophy to religious morality, from gardening to medicine. In the gardens of Versailles, the multiform nature is replaced by the regularity of a chessboard, while asylums and prisons spread throughout Europe, intended to exclude from human vision deviant behaviors that risked tarnishing the mathematical perfection of the new order.107 In natural sciences, the complex fabric of analogies, correspondences, and sympathies in which the parts of a gigantic living organism reverberate with each other, is replaced by the classification of isolated and dead parts.108 In painting, horizontal and mathematical perspective replaces vertical and symbolic perspective, gaining in illusion of order and realism what it loses in meaning and intent. The European taste for burning witches and alleged witches dates from this era – and not from the Middle Ages, as the libel enshrined in historiographical myth says. It is enough to follow the rise in the number of trials and convictions, from the foundation of the Holy Office in 1229 to the grand auto-da-fés of the 16th and 17th centuries, to verify that what was a handful of embers in the Middle Ages came to become, under the breath of the new times, a devastating fire in the full Modern Age. The liquidation of witches derives much less from the pure and simple defense of orthodoxy than from a new – geometric and purist – way of understanding orthodoxy, where there is no longer any room for uncertainty or for the sinner.

Yes, because the new ideas exerted as much influence within the Catholic Church as outside it. Of the founders of rationalism, for example, the main ones – Descartes, Malebranche, Arnauld & Nicole – were fervent Catholics committed to grounding the conversion of unbelievers in a perfect rational construction. The introducer of the new astronomy in the Iberian Peninsula was the local chief of the Inquisition, Juan de Zuñiga. One of the first humanists of the Renaissance, Eneas Silvio Piccolomini, became nothing less than Pope. The examples could multiply ad infinitum. One must be blind not to see within the very Counter-Reformation (which a silly simplification takes unilaterally as a conservative reaction) the influx of the new rationalist and Platonizing conceptions. The Society of Jesus asserts itself from the outset as a reformist utopianism, which will sweep sin from the world and establish a rational social order – even if it is in a remote Latin American backwater. The rationalization of dogma, announced at the Council of Trent, is completed a few centuries later in the Moral Theology of St. Alphonsus de Liguori. There, for the first time in the history of Christianity, eighteen centuries after the coming of the Savior, Christians receive the complete formulary of their duties and rights, according to a rigorous logical hierarchy that does not admit exceptions, doubts, or nuances of any kind: morality crystallizes into an axiomatic system, salvation becomes a problem of legal logic, solved by mathematical methods. If perfect discrimination and cataloging of moral duties were absolutely necessary for salvation, how could it have waited so many centuries to come to light? What would have become of so many generations of Christians from previous centuries, living in the uncertainty of a mere well-intentioned empiricism? The answer is: the rationalization of the moral code is not necessary for salvation, but is necessary for the internal economy of the rationalist mentality.109 After this, the spirit of legal formalism gradually takes possession of the Christian religion to such an extent that hordes of souls oppressed under the weight of regulations will later find relief in romantic Protestantism.110 The reduction of religion to mere internal sentiment would never have found an echo if it had not been preceded by the reduction of religion to rationalistic legalism.

Everywhere, the substitution of sensible reality by its rational and mathematical equivalents is thus imposing itself as a mundane substitute for spiritual asceticism. The flight from the real world to the world of ideal mathematical schemes does indeed have something ascetic about it, in the sense of an effort to oppose nature. But it is a purely cerebral asceticism, without real moral, spiritual, religious meaning in short. In it lies the root of the modern perversion that assigns to natural science the task of spiritually guiding humanity, in substitution for religious spirituality. The error is based on a stereotyped – and quite materialistic – vision of religious asceticism as mere sensory impoverishment. The mathematization of nature is sensory impoverishment, just without spiritual gain. The lack of spiritual gain is then compensated by the wealth of technical applications derived from science, which further enhances, in the eyes of the crowd, the priestly prestige of the caste of scientists.

The process started by Nicholas of Cusa will find its culmination four centuries later with Auguste Comte, who will explicitly make natural science a religion, and the scientific caste a clergy.

Immediately, however, its effect was to dilute in the consideration of spatial infinity the human capacity for spiritual intuition, born, on the contrary, to focus on the only necessary thing, going straight to metaphysical infinity and bypassing all the merely quantitative undefineds of the cosmic order. As among the primitive Bantus, the disappearance of the infinite god expands the cosmic pantheon disproportionately, in an unlimited proliferation of spiritual attention foci. That, soon after, under the impact of the ideas of Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno developed the most exacerbated fantasies about the plurality of inhabited worlds, is just the first symptom of the centrifugal tendency that would henceforth take hold of European intellectuality, increasingly absorbed in the variety of cosmic manifestation and increasingly distant from any metaphysical principle capable of establishing legitimate criteria of knowledge validity.

In the course of this process, it is not surprising that, having lost the path to authentic spirituality, the subtle and remote forces of cosmic nature began to be taken as spiritual. In the 19th century, occultism and spiritualism, widely disseminated among the literate strata, will explain the spirit as a subtlety or dilution of matter, that is, as rarefied matter. But at the same time that the “spiritualists” Allan Kardec and Madame Blavatsky unknowingly restored Epicurean physics, the materialist Karl Marx was writing his defense of Epicurus against Democritus. Not a fortuitous coincidence: the massive influx of socialist militants into the ranks of spiritualism and occultism – one of the most striking phenomena of the mental life of the literate classes in the 19th century – shows the existence of an affinity between these two apparently antagonistic currents of ideas, an affinity that is easily explained by their common origin in the Renaissance worldview.

The doctrine of subtlety will find a powerful verbal support at the beginning of the 20th century in the new physics of Einstein and Planck, rhetorically interpreted: the physical notion of “energy”, as opposed to the dense matter of the visible world, will often be taken – and not only by ignorant laymen – as a true synonym for the spirit. This conception has led, in the modern world, to the dissemination of thousands of pseudo-mysticisms and pseudo-esotericisms that promise, by the “subtlety” of the disciple’s body, to raise him to the supreme heights of spiritual knowledge – depriving him, for example, of dense protein foods, considered spiritually harmful, as if the weakening of the body were in itself a spiritual merit and as if there could be no fat mystics or muscular saints. The Dalai Lama, with accurate concision, called this caricature “spiritual materialism”. Thus, from the expansion of the sensible universe inaugurated in the Renaissance, we arrive at the dominant conception of a totally flattened, unidimensional and oppressive universe, where the difference between the upper and lower layers is reduced to the quantitative scale of the coarse and the subtle, as if, for example, the difference in planes between the ink in which these letters are printed and the spirit of the author who wrote them could be bridged with the greatest ease through the simple progressive dilution of the ink.

It is not strange that, through this path, Western civilization, having intended to overcome all religious mythology, ended up reaching, in the 20th century, the cult of extraterrestrials. The “astronaut gods” meet all the requirements of the modern imagination, marked, on the one hand, by the confusion between the visible sky and the spiritual sky, and on the other by the need for a mise-en-scène “scientific” for the coarse myths with which it is satisfying as it can the craving for the wonderful that, in it, replaces the authentic spiritual thirst. This is how a worldview of a depressing primitivism can coexist, in the minds of many of today’s thinkers, with the highest and most complex scientific knowledge. This is also how it is possible, over two millennia of thought evolution, a philosopher imbued with the most modern and advanced conceptions to fall back, by force of them themselves, into the childish fantasy of Epicurean materialism.

A certain loss of the sense of reality seems like a chronic occupational disease of the class of scientists, especially physicists, astrophysicists, astronomers, mathematicians, etc., accustomed to living in a universe of admittedly fictitious conceptions, coerced only by the conventionalism of a rule of the game. Adult men who regard life as pure game are severely affected by puerilism, in the sense of Huizinga,111 and no longer have the spirit of high seriousness that, by right, would be inherent to the idea of science. It is terrifying to see how scientists from the community that Raymond Ruyer called “gnostics of Princeton” amuse themselves by conceiving “universe models,” without the slightest concern to inquire whether these models were ever put into practice.112 It is even more terrifying to see how these people accommodate all the worst illogisms, seeing in them a defect of reality itself and never of the structure of their science. “The fictitious character of the principles,” Einstein said, "is perfectly evidenced by the fact that it is possible to present two essentially different bases, each one reaching a high degree of agreement with the experience."113 The dogma of their own intrinsic intellectual honesty seems to prevent physicists from asking if there is something wrong with what they are doing. But a certain amount of charlatanism seems to have been introduced into physics by Galileo, when he proclaimed to have surpassed the notion of ancient science, according to which an object not impelled by an external force remains at rest — an illusion of the senses, according to him.114 In reality, he pontificated, an object in such conditions remains stationary or in uniform linear motion. And, after thus overthrowing ancient physics, he discreetly clarified that the uniform linear motion does not really exist, but is a fiction conceived by the mind to facilitate measurements. Well, if the object not moved from outside remains at rest or has a fictitious movement, this means, strictly speaking, that it remains at rest in all cases, exactly as ancient physics said, and that Galileo, through a new measurement system, was only able to explain why it remains at rest. That is, Galileo did not dispute ancient physics, he just invented a better way to prove that it was right, and that the testimony of the senses, being truthful enough, does not in itself have the proof of its truthfulness — something that was already common knowledge since the time of Aristotle. This episode inaugurated the mania of modern scientists to take simple method changes as if they were “proofs” of a new constitution of reality.

But in the field of mathematics, it was the fascination with the idea of spatial and quantitative infinity that led the human mind to the worst eccentricities, where the refinement of ingenious arguments coexists with a total lack of sensibility.

Just to give an example: The renowned Georg Cantor believed he could refute Euclid’s 5th principle (that the whole is greater than the part) by arguing that the set of even numbers, although part of the set of integers, can be put into bijective correspondence with it, so that the two sets would have the same number of elements and, thus, the part would be equal to the whole:

1, 2, 3, 4… n
2, 4, 6, 8… 2n = n

With this demonstration, Cantor and his followers believed they were overthrowing, along with an ancient geometry principle, also an established belief of common sense and one of the pillars of classical logic, thus unveiling the horizons of a new era of human thought.

This reasoning is based on the assumption that both the set of integers and the set of evens are actual infinite sets, and therefore it can be rejected by anyone who believes, with Aristotle, that quantitative infinity is only potential, never actual. But, even accepting the premise of actual infinities, Cantor’s demonstration is just a word game, and not very clever at its core.

Firstly, it is true that if we represent integers each by a symbol (or numeral), we have there a set (infinite) of symbols or numerals; and if, in this set, we want to highlight the numbers that represent even numbers with special symbols or numerals, then we have a “second” set that is part of the first; and, being both infinite, the two sets will have the same number of elements, confirming Cantor’s argument. But this is to confuse numbers with their mere symbols, making unjustified abstraction of the mathematical properties that define and differentiate numbers from each other and, therefore, implicitly abolishing also the distinction between even and odd, on which the purported argument is based. “4” is a symbol, “2” is a symbol, but it is not the symbol “4” that is double 2, but the quantity 4, whether it is represented by that symbol or by four dots. The set of integers may contain more numerical symbols than the set of even numbers – since it includes the symbols of evens and odds – but not a greater quantity of units than the one contained in the series of evens. Cantor’s thesis slips out of this obviousness by the expedient of playing with a double meaning of the word “number”, sometimes using it to designate a defined quantity with certain properties (among which the ability to occupy a certain place in the number series and to be even or odd), and sometimes to designate the mere number symbol, that is, the numeral.

The series of even numbers is composed of evens because it is counted in twos, i.e., skipping one unit between each two numbers; if it wasn’t counted like that, the numbers wouldn’t be even. It’s useless here to resort to the subterfuge that Cantor refers to the mere “set” and not to the “ordered series”; for the set of even numbers would not be of evens if its elements could not be arranged two by two in an uninterrupted ascending series that progresses by adding 2, never 1; and no number could be considered even if it could freely swap places with any other in the integer series. “Parity” and “place in the series” are inseparable concepts: if n is even, it is because both n + 1 and n – 1 are odd. In this sense, it is only the implicit sum of the unmentioned units that makes the series of evens be of evens. Therefore – and here is Cantor’s fallacy – , there are not here two series of numbers, but a single one, counted in two ways: the series of even numbers is not really part of the series of integers, but is the very series of integers, counted or named in a certain way. The notion of “set” is what, when abusively detached from the notion of “series”, produces all this crazy dance, giving the appearance that even numbers can constitute a “set” independently of each one’s place in the series, when the fact is that, abstracted the position in the series, there is no more even or odd at all. If the series of integers can be represented by two sets of symbols, one only of evens, another of evens plus odds, this does not mean that these are two really distinct series. The confusion that exists there is between “element” and “unit”. A set of x units certainly contains the same number of “elements” as a set of x pairs, but not the same number of units.

What Cantor does is, at its core, to substantialize or even hypostatize the notion of “even” or “parity”, assuming that any number can be even “in itself”, regardless of its place in the series and its relation to all other numbers (including, of course, its own half), and that evens can be counted as things and not as mere intercalated positions in the series of integers.

In his “argument”, it’s not about a real distinction between whole and part, but rather about a merely verbal comparison between a whole and the same whole, differently named. Not being about a true whole and a true part, one cannot then speak of an equality of elements between whole and part, nor, therefore, of a refutation of Euclid’s 5th principle. Cantor misses the mark by a long shot.115

That such gross sophisms can pass as serious threats to the foundations of classical geometry and even to the principles of civilization that we inherited from the Greco-Roman tradition is merely a sign of the impotent revolt of an exacerbated mathematical imagination against the real order of things, which that tradition, with all its faults and limitations, exemplifies.

The loss of the sense of metaphysical infinitude, causing an imaginative exacerbation of the concept of spatial and quantitative infinitude, could not fail to bring, in the long run, besides the “disenchantment of the world”, profound damages to human intelligence, which exceed a mere aesthetic loss to reverberate in a destruction of the rational foundation of the sciences. One of the strategies resorted to for this purpose is to appeal to the testimony of scientific experience to try to invalidate, based on it, the logical principles that validate in turn the very idea of scientific experience – which is more or less like trying to cover a bad check with a deposit made up of the same check. This childish expedient is the hallmark of psychologism (the reduction of logical relations to “phenomena of the mind”) – a way of thinking that continues to enjoy certain prestige in university circles for the only possible reason that no one there has read its refutation by Edmund Husserl. In their irrational hostility against the very idea of universal principles, many scientific thinkers – including some very great ones – resort to subterfuges that are utterly unworthy of men of science. A sad example is Jean Piaget. In Wisdom and Illusions of Philosophy,116 he contests the universality of the principle of identity, based on the example of the boy who, having counted seven balls, claims they are eight or nine as soon as they are lined up with larger intervals, without adding any. “When seven balls become eight or nine like a seven-centimeter elastic band reaching eight or nine, is it the same principle of identity or a slightly different one?” Piaget asks. And he mocks: “My philosophers had ready answers, but I forgot what they were”.

He must have indeed forgotten, otherwise he would not write such things. One has to be asleep or hypnotized not to realize that, in this case, the boy simply did not distinguish between discrete quantity (the number of balls) and continuous quantity (the linear distance occupied), considering the set as a confused synthesis of both; and from the increase in the continuous quantity he deduced the increase in the discrete quantity. He deduced wrongly, but what does this have to do with the universality (or not) of the principle of identity? What happened in this case was merely a duality of meanings attributed to the term “balls”: the experimenter referred to the arithmetic set – abstract – of the seven balls, the boy to the concrete figure of the balls distributed in a certain space. To consider only the balls, without the space, the boy would have to rise one more degree of abstraction, for which, as Piaget himself shows in other works, he would have to be a slightly older boy.

Now, how to deduce, from the difference in abstraction capacity between adults and children (or children of different ages), the difference in their respective senses of identity? On the contrary: the mistake made by the boy implies a consciousness of identity absolutely equal to that of adults, otherwise he could not recognize, in the set increased to eight balls, the same set that previously had seven; the boy merely showed that he perceives that increase and decrease do not alter identity, which is perfectly Aristotelian, so to speak, and is something that adults perceive in the very same way as he does.

On the other hand, it is clear that it is easier to recognize the identity of a substance endowed with real unity, in the Aristotelian sense (“this rabbit is this rabbit”), than that of a “set”, which is only a conventional unity, a “mathematical whole”, a quasi-substance, or substantia secundum quid. That mathematical wholes should be regarded as units, regardless of not having a substantial unity, is something that the child will only admit when their mind is trained to accept the conventions of mathematical reasoning as premises. This transition requires a rise in the degree of abstraction, and what is not understood is how the child could move from one level of abstraction to another without the permanence of the sense of identity. Piaget aims to see a duality of logical principles where there is only a difference between the aspects perceived by two individuals in an object that they both know to be the same.

Incidentally, Piaget, who is the author of a Treatise on Logic, is perfectly illogical whenever he attempts to situate the relations between science and philosophy. He rejects all pretensions of philosophy to constitute a knowledge “superior” to science (and even to constitute any knowledge at all), but recognizes philosophy as an “activity of coordination of values, including cognitive ones” (that is, the values that guide the scientificity of science). But how could a coordinating principle not be in some way “superior” to the elements coordinated? And how would it be possible to coordinate values of scientific truth without being based on a criterion of truth whose foundations were admitted as true and therefore endowed with cognitive validity?

In the end, Piaget, who accepts as a dogma the Kantian assumption that there is no transition from fact to value, does not even realize that deducing from the fact of the confusion between balls and space a duality of logical principles is nothing other than transitioning from fact to value — a blatant psychologism.

When such primary mistakes are introduced into the highest scientific considerations and nobody realizes their presence, it is because academic dialogue has become something like the conversation of hypnotized people in the Garden of Epicurus or like a session of Santo Daime — everybody out of their minds. It is because science has given up on being scientific, contenting itself with meeting the procedural requirements of an “experimental” protocol in which it no longer even believes and whose foundations have already disappeared under thick layers of forgetfulness.

Edmund Husserl describes the decline of the scientific ideal in the sciences of the 20th century in these terms:117

"Modern science has abandoned the ideal of authentic science, which was active in the sciences since Plato; it has abandoned the radicalism of scientific self-responsibility. Its internal driving force is no longer that radicalism that, in itself, continually requires not to admit any knowledge for which it is not possible to account on the basis of originally primary principles and, moreover, perfectly evident…".

Given this state of affairs, it is not surprising that, soon after, the failures of such a degraded science would come to be taken as arguments against the very possibility of any universally valid scientific knowledge, as if this science were the only possible one, as if it were not, in fact, far below the possibilities contained in the very concept of “science”. When Thomas S. Kuhn and Michel Foucault finally reduced the history of the sciences to the more or less arbitrary succession of “paradigms”, epistemes or semi-conscious cognitive pre-schemes that enter and leave the scene for generally irrational reasons, they not only shook the confidence in the existing sciences, but in the very ideal of science, whose prestige they had simply usurped. Dethroned at once the authentic queen and the false one, the throne was delivered to the ambition of all old claimants: neo-pragmatism, neo-relativism, new rhetoric, neo-Epicureanism — it is the whole procession of old irrationalisms that returns to the scene, adding the final touch of madness without which the hallucinating saga of the gods of space would not be complete.

§21 The divinization of time (I): The strength of the means

But the descent of the spiritual focus of attention that fills the void left by the supreme Divinity through the multiplication of cosmic gods would not be complete if the deities of space were not joined by those of time. The divinization of History will play, in the West, the role of ancestor worship among the Yorubas abandoned by Olorum.

The loss of the sense of metaphysical, or vertical, infinity was compensated by the discovery of the two horizontal dimensions of the physical world. The revelation of spatial infinity was followed by that of temporal infinity: materialism was followed by historicism and progressivism.

No discovery is made without instruments. Nicholas could not have grasped spatial infinity without the prodigious development of dialectics in the Middle Ages, just as Galileo and Newton could not have scientifically formulated the same idea if they had only the mathematical resources of Archimedes or Nicomachus. Similarly, the advent of historicism would not have been possible without historical criticism.

In both of these lines of development, the discovery of new and powerful intellectual instruments opens man’s vision of unsuspected continents, but the expansion of the range of visible things comes at the cost of the loss of the sense of unity and hierarchy of the real. The most acute symptom of this loss is that the two new dimensions discovered could never be articulated with each other, but they immediately entered into a seemingly insurmountable antagonism: the expansion of space generates the modern physical-mathematical sciences, the discovery of historical sense originates the human sciences, forming two separate and hostile cultures, where all attempts at conciliation and synthesis have failed.

Both movements that generated modern irreligiosity originated from within the religious field and under the stimulus of religious impulses. Just as Nicholas' cosmology intended to give a new vision of nature that was more worthy of representing the manifestation of divine infinity, so too historical criticism, from which historicism and progressivism will originate, is born from a desire to better understand the Holy Scriptures. And just as the quantitative expansion of the known physical universe produces the dispersion of intelligence into a dust of facts increasingly devoid of metaphysical significance, so too the deep understanding of the philological details of the biblical text will generate endless controversies in which the essential sense of the whole will eventually be lost.

Historicism, in its origins, has nothing that even remotely resembles a new idolatry, let alone an idolatry of the abstract. It is born, indeed, from a reaction against abstractionism, whether of the scholastics, or of the rationalists and empiricists; it is born from a healthy movement towards the concrete, the singular, the sensible.

According to the great historian of historicism, Friedrich Meinecke, the discovery of the historical dimension was a spiritual revolution of vast scope. It operates a rupture of European thought with the abstract universalism of the Greeks, whose vision of human nature as a fixed and unchangeable essence remained dominant despite all the spiritual mutations of the Middle Ages, and which after the Renaissance had acquired a new vigor through the conception of universal law — an abstract and universal moral norm imbricated in the constitution of the cosmos with the fixity of a physical law. Historicism will oppose to this conception three new ideas: 1st, instead of the fixed and repetitive cosmos of mechanistic rationalism, the vision of the universe as a living, dynamic process, where there is room for the unexpected and creativity; 2nd, instead of the abstract and universal “human nature”, the vision of the inexhaustible variety of types and individualities; 3rd, the intuition of human personality as a process that develops and creates itself in time. One of its first manifestations of the new mentality is the aesthetics of the Count of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), a great thinker who, by giving his ideas a perhaps overly informal and literary expression, ended up seeing them labeled by posterity as the sublime of nonsense — a sign that he was much loved, but little understood.

According to Shaftesbury, matter could not, by a mechanical movement, engender plants, animals, and men. The identical unity of our own personality cannot take root in matter, which corrupts and falls apart without our person falling apart with it. Both the cause of being and its beauty and the principle of its identical permanence reside in form, in the normative and structuring force, in the “idea”. So far, Shaftesbury does not speak differently from a Platonic or Neoplatonic. But this “idea”, for him, is not the concept of a genus or a universal abstract rule, hovering in the sky of pure ideas above concrete individualities: on the contrary, it resides in the concrete individuality, it is the internal principle of its differentiation, of its singularity. Each singular being has within itself an inwardly structuring spiritual force that singularizes it and that is like the algorithm of all the transformations through which it will pass in the course of its existence, thus being the principle of the conservation of unity in change and through change. Shaftesbury calls it inward form, inward structure, inward constitution, inward order, inward character, and other names always composed with inward. Friedrich Meinecke thus summarizes Shaftesbury’s contribution to the formation of historicism:118

"The most important thing in this doctrine is the first recognition of the principle of individuality. All particular forms, although ultimately reducible to a common unitary principle, have their own ‘genius’, which is inherent to them, which always becomes evident in their beauty, through the action of life.

Everything that is created or is created contains structure and form and, to the extent that it is not just a body, it is again a structuring form. All these thoughts could one day give way to a deeper understanding of history. Everywhere an interaction of freedom and necessity, a wealth of peculiar structures, continually recreating themselves, that sprout from an inner central point, from a forming idea."

The next step in the formation of historicist consciousness comes with the philosophy of Leibniz. It emphasizes that all reality is composed of individualities, and nothing exists in the form of the generic or the homogeneously identical. The uniqueness of each human being or each leaf of a tree does not result from a deviation of sensible reality from an abstract norm of perfection but rather from the fact that the supreme law of the universe is the law of irreducible individuality. Even God is not an abstract universal concept, but a singular living individual. The inexhaustible plurality of individualities does not descend into chaos and confusion, and everywhere, order and harmony prevail. This is not due to an external and universal law that oppresses and directs individual actions but because each individual being carries within itself the image of the entire universe. The universe is composed of universes, the macrocosm of microcosms that reflect the infinitude of the supreme unity in a quantitative manner through their microcosmic images. Each microcosm is complete and total in itself, irreducibly unique and distinct from all others. Leibniz referred to these infinite individualities as “monads.”

The third step was taken by Giambattista Vico, an obscure rhetoric professor at the University of Naples, whose ideas were solemnly ignored by his contemporaries. Swimming against the tide of his time, which generally regarded physical and mathematical sciences as the epitome of secure knowledge, Vico asserted that one can only know perfectly well what one has created oneself. Since nature was made not by man but by God, only God has certain and perfect knowledge of nature. On the other hand, man knows his own actions and thoughts very well, as they are his own creations. Therefore, the surest knowledge is not in physics but in History. The true “cogito,” the foundation of human knowledge, is not, as Descartes believed, an abstract and universal thinking self but rather the concrete self that remembers its actions and thoughts and can narrate them.

Vico goes beyond his two great predecessors by constructing the entire edifice of the new philosophy – the interpretation of reality as a process, as History. In the West, he is the first to emphasize the differences in temperaments and inclinations among individuals and peoples as causes of great events. He asserts that men are rarely driven by rational and coherent philosophical conceptions; generally, they act out of subjective, often petty, blind, selfish, and irrational motives. To understand the course of events, one must delve into an understanding of their differences – not only from one individual to another and from one people to another but also from one phase to another in the development of the same people and the same individual. Things happen differently because at different times, individuals or collectives desire different things. If the inexhaustible variety of individual motivations, when expressed in actions, does not result in chaos, it is because there is a greater force that harmonizes human actions toward a beneficial outcome. The vision of a plurality of bad actions leading to a good result is deeply Christian. Vico, like Leibniz, firmly believes in Providence.

These three founding fathers of historicism were actually reviving values of ancient and medieval spirituality buried under rationalist uniformity. It is impossible not to see in Shaftesbury the mark of Neoplatonic mysticism with its vision of the universe as a living harmony, connected by the bonds of sympathy, analogy, and symbolic correspondences. Vico, on the other hand, by describing history as the history of consciousness, skips over almost two millennia of Greek heritage to return to the vision of Genesis, the vision of the universe as a temporal process, the epic of creation, fall, and redemption of man. Likewise, Leibniz’s emphasis on uniqueness as the principle of reality echoes the scotistic “haecceitas.” John Duns Scotus, the Subtle Doctor, the last of the great medieval scholastics, diverged from the entire scholastic tradition to assert that there are not only eternal ideas or universal models of species and genera but also of individuals, with all the irreducible differences that characterize them. Scotus believed that the contrary hypothesis was a pagan residue hostile to the Christian doctrine of the immortality of the soul (Aristotle, for whom knowledge strictly concerned only species and genera, did not, in fact, believe in the immortality of the individual soul).

Historicism, as we will see later, led to an idolatrous divinization of time and historical process, ultimately culminating in the worship of an abstract idea – “progress” – on whose altar millions of human individuals were sacrificed. However, the initial steps towards historicism must be considered remarkable milestones towards the Christianization of philosophy. The stereotyped view of the Middle Ages as the period of Christian philosophy par excellence and the Modern Age as the time of philosophy’s rupture with Christianity is entirely erroneous. In addition to the historical fact that all founders of modern philosophy were devout Christians driven by declared apologetic purposes, modern philosophy is Christian for a much deeper reason, of an interior order. The entire legacy of Greek thought centered around the notion of the cosmos, the sensible nature, taken as the prototype of reality. Even when referring to spiritual realities, Greek philosophers tended to see them as an image and likeness of the things of the sensible world. Greek thought was fundamentally marked by an objectivist-external view, and thus, when speaking of man, it tended to do so in the same terms as it spoke of the things of the external world, seeking in man the same type of stability and fixity that the study of physical sciences sought in the laws of nature. Using Ortega y Gasset’s brilliant term, it was a “thing-ist” thought: it saw man in the image of things. Medieval scholasticism took gigantic steps towards Christianizing philosophy, but it could not completely free itself from the “thing-ist” residue. Now, Christian thought centers around the relationship between man and God, skipping over the cosmos, which is relegated to the secondary function of a stage or reflection of the main drama that takes place in the human soul. “For whom did God make the world?” asked the catechism of our childhood. And the answer was: “for man.” The human being, the center of perspective of cosmic creation, is also its center of construction, as Father Teilhard de Chardin would say. Therefore, it is not man who must be described in the image and likeness of the cosmos, but the cosmos in the image and likeness of man, and man in the image and likeness of God. In man, the two contrary currents of freedom and necessity converge as images of the two fundamental divine attributes – Infinitude and Absoluteness. On the one hand, man is free to make decisions and shape his destiny. His freedom reflects the divine Infinitude. But God is Absolute, omnipotent; thus, man is externally subject to cosmic laws and internally subject to moral law. It is evident that such a being cannot be effectively described by a “thing-ist” anthropology that considers him a fixed essence subjected to uniform cause-and-effect laws like the bodies of the visible world. He can only be described according to an optic that takes into account, on the one hand, the variety and unpredictability of individual actions and, on the other hand, harmoniously integrates this variety into the framework of cosmic and divine determinations that limit human freedom. To describe man dynamically, dialectically, one must consider both freedom and necessity in the unity of a real temporal unfolding. In short, one must make History. Only History can account for the complexity of the human life vision as a drama of salvation.

Now, this dimension was completely absent from Greek thought, and in scholasticism, it only gradually opened its way. The discovery or rediscovery of the historical dimension first required overcoming Greek naturalistic cosmology. As one cannot overcome without first absorbing, the entire scholastic period, until St. Thomas, can be considered a gigantic effort to absorb Greek cosmology into the Christian context. The actual overcoming only begins with Duns Scotus and his theory of “haecceitas” – the eternal form of human individuality, the divine root of the immortality of the soul. However, by that time, scholasticism was already exhausted – not intellectually, but socially: new forms of intellectual activity were beginning to develop outside the university (the School), and the great thinkers of the subsequent period, Descartes, Spinoza, Pascal, Leibniz, were no longer teachers but independent investigators, living on some trade like Spinoza, some public employment like Leibniz, or family income like Descartes and Pascal. The change in the social setting of philosophical activity altered the style of philosophizing and even writing about philosophy. Hence, the appearance of a drastic rupture where, in essence – and coexisting, of course, with antagonistic elements as indicated in the previous paragraph – there is a continuity of a coherent evolution: the discovery of subjectivity with Descartes and Montaigne and soon after the outbreak of historicist consciousness only continues, in the direction of increasing Christianization, an evolution towards which scholasticism, with Duns Scotus, was already manifestly and strongly inclined.119

How was it then possible for the new movement to take the path of enthroning a new cosmic deity – the hypostasized “History,” the “process,” the “progress” – under whose obsessively dominant figure the image of God and that of the concrete human individual would simultaneously disappear?

Nothing in the world is done without instruments. The form of an idea is not embodied in matter except through the mediation of matter. Between intention and result, one must reckon with the interference of means and instruments, which do not bend to our will but impose all sorts of obstacles on their execution because these means also have their own form and structure, as well as their own matter, which is also structured and endowed with form. It is in this mediation, as Aristotle saw well, that deviations are introduced, the principle of corruption, so that the unfolding of History ends up constituting, in Weber’s famous phrase, “the totality of unintended results of human actions.”

Historical consciousness, to be realized, needed to create a historical science. For this, it needed investigative tools. Contemporary with Shaftesbury, Vico, and Leibniz, historical research and documentation techniques developed prodigiously and accelerated in subsequent epochs. In fact, they had been developing even before them, with a theological purpose: to obtain a more reliable text of the Bible. These tools represent an invaluable achievement. But it was the discussion surrounding them – and above all the impulse to draw philosophical consequences directly from technical achievements, without the mediation of philosophical criticism – that ended up diverting the historicist movement from its original destiny and put it on the path of a new idolatry.

The impulse to compare, analyze, and criticize documents is a philological instinct. It springs from the new love for languages, a movement commonly called humanism, a tremendously equivocal term because a Renaissance humanist has less love for the concrete and living human being than for texts, documents, old dusty diplomas, and ancient languages. “Humanism” does not come from love for humanity but from the humanæ litteræ, “human letters,” which means any text other than the Holy Scriptures. Anything will do: a letter, a lease contract, a law promulgated by the king of an extinct kingdom – everything is a document of human speech, and as such, it is desired, preserved, studied, and analyzed. “Humanism” means the museum spirit: the love for documents comes along with the mania of collections – stamps, coins, pieces of old statues. The impulse to collect arises from a mixture of aesthetic and occult motives: magical power is attributed to fragments of statues; in the fifteenth century, especially in Italy, their use in witchcraft rituals offered more promising expectations than the eyes of toads, crow’s feet, human nails, and hair; enthusiasts of witchcraft pay large sums for a finger of Venus or an elbow of Mercury.

The new model of the educated man interested in these things is very different from the medieval intellectual. The latter was essentially a university scholar, a member of the proud academic caste that, supported by the applause of hordes of students, challenged kings and the Pope. This caste was international, formed by men who left their homeland to settle in major university centers where a supranational language, Latin, was spoken, and where French, Irish, Italian, Saxons lived on equal terms, entirely forgetting their differences of origin. For the scholar, love for the homeland was a condemnable atavism, a residue of worldliness, just as any nostalgia for the past, family origin, or native landscape: “Nothing can be done,” wrote Hugo de S. Victor, “for the student who longs for the hut where he was born.”

The new intellectual, on the other hand, is a member or servant of the courtly caste. He lives at court, no longer among his fellow scholars, united by a common contempt for their national and class origins, but among princes and dukes, ladies and pages, soldiers, and courtesans. His verbal atmosphere is no longer the dry technical terminology of scholastic dialectic but the pleasant and elegant conversation in the national language, filled with flattering flourishes. Different social classes correspond to different masters: medieval scholars found theirs in Plato and Aristotle; the humanist will be inspired by Ovid, Horace, Virgil, and especially by Quintilian. The codifier of ancient rhetoric will acquire, in the eyes of the new class, an authority that not even Aristotle could reach in the Middle Ages. He is beyond criticism, and any discussion can be cut short with the formula: "It is enough that Quintilian said it…".

The abandonment of dialectic in favor of rhetoric is a decisive change in mentality: arguments are no longer valued for their exhaustive demonstration but for their persuasive charm. The inclination to philosophize literarily, preferring words to ideas, is inaugurated. The love for words, especially those expressing personal feelings, will give new impetus to national languages, which strive to imitate the beauty and persuasiveness of ancient literature.

The new intellectual abhors the university. The reason is clear. Born and formed by the independent initiative of groups of scholars, universities gradually, throughout the Middle Ages, became centers of power, feared and envied. Since at least the twelfth century, kings and popes have competed for hegemony over them, but they manage to maintain their independence, sometimes allying with one against the other, or vice versa, or telling both authorities to go to hell and promoting student riots that made the powerful tremble on both sides. The long dispute ends, in the Renaissance, with the Pope’s victory: universities become organs of the Church. The defeated kings and aristocratic class begin to form their own group of intellectuals outside the university. The new thinkers, who turn up their noses at university teaching – Machiavelli, Descartes, Montaigne – are not lone gunmen: they are court officials or members of the aristocratic class. They express the resentment of those rejected by the victors of the day.

The ambitions of the aristocratic caste, freed from the moral constraints imposed on them by the Roman clergy, will multiply and spread to the point of self-glorification. There are no limits to the power of the talented individual who, through genius, cunning, or violence, knows how to impose his tastes and values, legislating for himself within the borders of his kingdom – only delineated by the proximity of other ambitious men, endowed with equal talent and power. Everywhere, a sense of expansion and dominance over this worldly realm replaces that of internalization and spiritual ascent. The first Renaissance cathedral, Santa Maria dei Fiori, the work of Brunelleschi, marks this transformation. While the Gothic cathedral isolates the believer from the outside world, projecting him towards a vertical luminosity, Brunelleschi’s cathedral is situated in the center of the landscape and organizes, like an axis, the surrounding space. The Gothic cathedral withdraws from the world: the Renaissance cathedral reigns over it. The former must be appreciated from within, in the unreal light projected by stained glass, among the arches rising to the sky, over the faithful recollected in prayer; the latter must be seen from the outside and from afar, reigning over the landscape of the world.

Unable to justify itself morally, the ambition for dominion will find an ordering pattern and a new criterion of legitimacy, replacing ethics with aesthetics. The new world of war and conquest, of Machiavellianism and treachery in the struggle for power, is not a good world, but it can be beautiful: Machiavelli describes the State as a work of art – the temple of aristocratic self-glorification built on the blood of enemies, former friends, and even, if necessary, relatives.

It is in this atmosphere of nationalism, rhetoric, aestheticism, and collecting that the love for written documents emerges. From the love for written documents, the interest – and from the interest, the technique – of distinguishing the authentic from the forged arises, of determining for each one its probable date of composition – by the type of letters, the spelling, the ink used to write them.

The year 1440 marks a milestone in the history of these studies. In that year, the humanist Lorenzo Valla exposed the falsehood of the alleged Donation of Constantine, arguing that it was a forged document created at least four or five centuries after the death of the Roman emperor. The same Valla, publishing an annotated edition of the New Testament a few years later, thus became the founder of the technique of textual criticism.120

From that point on, the achievements of scholarly technique accumulated rapidly:

1559: The publication of História da Igreja (History of the Church) by the Protestant scholars of Magdeburg begins.

1588: Annales ecclesiatici by Cardinal Cesare Baronius.

1678: Glossarium ad scriptores mediæ et infimæ latinitatis by Charles du Fresne.

1681: De re diplomatica by Benedictine monk Jean Mabillon.

1693: Codex juris gentium diplomaticum by Leibniz.

1695: Dictionnaire historique et critique by Pierre Bayle.

1697: Ars critica by Jean Leclerc.

1708: Paleographia græca by Dom Bernard de Montfaucon.

1750: Nouveau traité de Diplomatique by Toustain and Tassin.

Long before the emergence of History as a science, these works laid the foundation for what would later be called “auxiliary sciences of History.” While they eventually led to the birth of historical science in the 19th century, their immediate effect—also contributing to this outcome—was to discredit the historical narrative as it was then known, casting skeptical doubt over the entire picture of the past. Therefore, it is not surprising that the prince of scholars, Pierre Bayle, became known not only, but especially, as a living emblem of skepticism. Having spent his life critically examining historical documents and pointing out the errors of historians, he never dared to personally write a history book.

The situation was shaped by the convergence of two forces:

  1. In the sphere of philosophical thought, everything tended to encourage a historical approach to reality to compensate for the weaknesses of rationalistic mechanicism.

  2. The advances in scholarly technique provided the tools for the creation of a historical science but, at the same time, revealed the inconsistency of the History as then known, fostering skeptical doubt about all knowledge of the past.

The result of this convergence was highly complex.

On one hand, historicism as a philosophical doctrine or worldview developed through an impressive succession of synthesis works starting with Vico and continuing with Montesquieu and Voltaire, reaching its pinnacle in G. W. F. Hegel’s Philosophy of History of 1820. Historicist thought reached maturity and became an influential force in the spiritual course of the world long before History itself was properly established as a science, which can confidently be dated to the works of Leopold von Ranke (from 1820 onwards). Notions that historical science would later dismantle as entirely inconsistent, such as the idea of a unified course of world events, linear progress of consciousness, or increasing freedom throughout time, had already gained significant prestige in the ideology of the educated classes by the time history proper, as we understand it today, began to take its first steps with Ranke. This precedence gave an aura of legitimacy to this usurper: to this day, what serves as history in the average mentality of intellectuals is a residue of historicist myths and legends, parasitizing the prestige of the very historical science that refutes them. This humiliating condition of a history that gives more strength to myths while striving to restore truth is one of the tragic ironies of the modern world.

On the other hand, in the absence of legitimate historical knowledge, the weapons forged in the workshops of scholars came to be used as “historical arguments” in religious and political controversies of the time. Assisted by scholarly argumentation, Protestants and Catholics accused each other of falsifying Church history, misinterpreting biblical texts, and more. Both churches recognized the strategic value of these new weapons, summoned legions of scholars, formed armies of historical critics, and disseminated and boasted about the results of their research. The History of the Church by the Magdeburg scholars (1559) was the first cannon shot fired by Protestant criticism. Rome retaliated with the Annales ecclesiatici by Cardinal Baronius (1588). As, until at least the 16th century, the dominant view of the course of History was that brought forth by the Bible—the History as the journey of man from creation to fall and redemption—the most remarkable outcome of these disputes was to cast doubt on the reliability of the biblical narrative and the Christian view of History. This view, implicitly accepted as true from antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages, now had to be explicitly explained and defended against its opponents, as seen in Bossuet’s Discours sur l’Histoire Universelle (1681). This shows that the polemics had brought it down from the realm of assumed truths to becoming one idea among many, competing on an equal footing.

Between Bossuet’s time and the French Revolution, attacks on Christian history multiplied both in number and intensity. Discredited was Bossuet’s providentialist history, but shaken was also the confidence in classical rationalism. The only apparent way forward was the direction of historical conception, rejecting the “immutable universal laws,” both in its Christian and scholastic version and its scientific and rationalist version, turning attention to the mutable, individual, singular, and irrepeatable. This was indeed the direction things seemed to be going, driven by the progress of auxiliary sciences that enabled historians to rescue the singular events that make up History. However, the auxiliary sciences alone could not do this without a theory of History capable of unifying them according to a rational hierarchy of criteria. This is where the ambiguity of the term “theory of History” comes into play: it means, at the same time, the theory of historical knowledge and the theory of historical events; on the one hand, the methodological framework of a science; on the other hand, a philosophical explanation of the whole historical fact. The two directions are indeed opposite: either a criteriology is established to plan historical investigations that will determine what happened, or, assuming what happened is known, a theoretical explanation of the whole is provided. The first of these tasks fell to Leopold von Ranke, while the second was undertaken by Georg W. F. Hegel.

Today we easily understand that Ranke was on the right track, that the philosophical synthesis of the whole historical process was a premature endeavor, and that, in the absence of sufficient historical knowledge resulting from an organized science, reflection could only be lost in the mists of a phantasmagoric pseudo-metaphysics and end in the worship of a new deity. Hegel worked in this direction, and unfortunately for future generations, Hegelianism had already become a powerful current of influence and a historical force in its own right, giving birth to Marxism and serving as the grandmother of Soviet Russia, at the time when sensible Ranke began his work.

The two lines evolved simultaneously, with many contacts and exchanges. On one hand, the advances in historical research corrected some of the most egregious excesses of Hegelian generalization here and there; on the other hand, Hegel’s and Marx’s conceptions also exerted their fascination and influence on professional historians. This eventually transformed historical science itself into a tool of the gigantic ideological warfare machine set up by the communists, forcing their adversaries to construct a similar apparatus to defend themselves. The dispute over History forms one of the most interesting aspects of the ideological war of the last two centuries. Capitalist supporters accuse communist historians of craftily selecting facts to fit a simplistic scheme; the communists respond that bourgeois historians only see isolated facts, not the underlying structure; the bourgeois retort that the communist takes the part for the whole, failing to see the spiritual factors in History and reducing everything to economics; the Marxist counters that the spiritual factors are an ideological veil that hides the reality of the economic factor; their adversary insists that the communist is ideological, turning History into mere revolutionary propaganda; the communist protests that all History is ideology, but the bourgeois version is disguised as science, and in response, they are accused of falsifying data, suppressing facts and characters to fit the mold of their desires.

From the perspective of scientific progress, the debate had a dual effect. On one hand, it greatly attenuated the dogmatic simplism of the original Marxist scheme, compelling Marxist theorists to acknowledge the significant interference of non-economic factors in History, stripping the proletariat of its role as the privileged agent of historical causality (admitting, for example, with Gramsci, the strategic function of the intelligentsia and, with Hobsbawm, even that of the Lumpenproletariat).121 On the other hand, it contaminated historical studies with Marxism, leading them to prioritize the economic aspects of historical causality or seek some other materialistic foundation to challenge Marxism on its own ground. The case of Weber is characteristic; he was anti-Marxist, seeking to demonstrate the influence of religious causes on historical events. However, being personally agnostic, influenced by positivism and incapable of grasping spiritual phenomena beyond their analogies and reflections in the social realm, he ended up falling into the vicious circle of Marxist explanation: after reducing a historical epoch to its economic aspects, he saw no other causes but economic ones. Thus, he ended up doing reluctantly what Marx did willingly.

However, from the broader perspective of intellectual evolution, the confrontation between historical science and historicist ideology had much deeper and devastating consequences.

The first consequence was that, whether leaning towards Marxism or towards rankian science, historical thinking ended up falling into some form of “progressive” ideology. In the former case, this was due to endorsing the theory that portrayed all of History evolving towards socialism; in the latter case, it was due to the positivist celebration of science as the superior — and, according to Comte, final — stage of the evolution of the human mind. Only in the 20th century, thanks largely to anthropology and Comparative Religion, which shed light on the values of other cultures and civilizations, did historical science venture to focus on the past without prejudging it according to the perspective that favored the present.122

The second consequence was that the idea of progress, essentially consisting of an immanent teleology in History, gradually narrowed the debate around the meaning of human life in general to the question of the “meaning of History.” This question can be summarized as follows: Does History have a predetermined, immanent meaning, or does man live in a vacuum where he can freely create whatever he wishes? While Marx indeed said that “men make their own history,” he neutralized this statement by asserting that History inevitably moved towards socialism. Friedrich Nietzsche was the main proponent of the idea that History had no meaning. For him, not only did History lack any meaning, but it was better that way. Only feeble, cowardly, and petty minds needed to take refuge in the myth of a “meaning of History.” The true man, the metaphysical warrior of the new times, whom Nietzsche called the Super-Man, did not want any predetermined meaning to be able to create his destiny as he pleased. Nietzsche became the father of various movements expressing the contemporary man’s rebellion against reason, science, history, and the glorification of instincts, blood, dreams, and delusions. Empowered by Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, these movements launched a vigorous attack on positivism and Marxism in the 20th century. Figures such as D. H. Lawrence, Carl G. Jung, and Ludwig Klages gave strong expression to these ideas, which in Brazil influenced one of our most talented thinkers: Vicente Ferreira da Silva.

Confronted with this resistance, the two ideologies of progress, Marxism, and positivism, joined hands to face it and preserve the “meaning of History.” It is needless to say that this intellectual alliance preceded and prepared the political-military alliance that would be celebrated after 1939 between Western democracies and communist dictatorships to confront the Axis powers. Radicalized by its formidable political repercussions, the confrontation between immanent meaning of History and History devoid of any meaning absorbed all of the 20th-century intellectual interest in the question of the meaning of life, to the point where the simple possibility that human life may have some meaning beyond earthly History disappeared from the view of contemporary man.

The identification of the immanent meaning of History with the meaning of life became such a deeply rooted belief that it entered the realm of unconscious assumptions: it is no longer a theory — it is a reality, a fact. The bet on the immanent meaning of History became, for millions and millions of people, the sole purpose of their existence, to the extent that even the slightest signs of History deviating from the expected meaning can trigger waves of despair, depression, suicides, and psychiatric hospitalizations worldwide. In the 1950s, the revelation of Stalin’s crimes, suddenly shattering the faith and hope of the communist movement, was a traumatic shock from which millions of militants never recovered. The fall of the Berlin Wall was another event of this kind.

These events are generally interpreted as signs that communism was a religion for these people; the loss of faith in communism, therefore, functioned as the biblical “stumbling block” that brutally contradicted their dearest beliefs.

However, this is only the most obvious and superficial aspect of the issue. Fundamentally, no one could bet on communism if they had not previously bet on the Meaning of History. The belief in the Meaning of History is common to both communists and Western democrats. While the latter do not believe in the Marxist scheme, revolution, or the advent of proletarian utopia, they believe in the progress of institutions, the gradual improvement of laws, the progressive reduction of poverty, universal education, and extending the benefits of modern economy and culture to all people. Just like for the communists, the meaning of life for them is identified with the individual’s participation in the construction of the future society. They differ only in the means and the type of society they aspire to, but like the communists, they cannot conceive that life may have any meaning outside or beyond History. For both, History and only History is the giver of Meaning to human life. This is precisely what I call the divinization of History. Socialism and Capitalism are thus two sects that split from the same religion. On the other hand, it is evident that reducing the meaning of life to the meaning of History confines it to the temporal dimension, turning away from eternity. Thus, the complete immersion of man in immanence, which we observed in the evolution of scientific thought, is repeated in the other arm of the cross through the divinization of time in political and social ideology.

§22 The divinization of time (II): Beaux draps

But History would not have been able to elevate itself to the status of a goddess without the collaboration of two other factors that, between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, decisively changed the course of ideas. The first was the doctrine of the “collective will”, introduced by the theorists of the French Revolution. The second was – as a consequence of the first – the Hegelian doctrine of the State.

For all political thinkers from Antiquity to the Renaissance, society was nothing more than a system of relations between human beings. It enveloped and contained men like a net envelops and contains fish, limiting their movements but not altering their intrinsic nature: a fish does not become a fish or cease to be one because it falls into a net. Of course, no serious thinker, at least since Aristotle, ignored the social nature of man, the essential sociality of the zoon politikon. They recognized it to such an extent that they even denied human condition to men who were detached from social life. But recognizing the essentially social nature of man in general is one thing, and quite another is to assert that society has some reality and consistency of its own, independent and above the concrete men who make it up. It is this latter affirmation that differentiates modern thought from ancient thought, and characterizes it with increasing emphasis since the Renaissance and especially after the 18th century. For the ancients, “society” was not a substantia prima, in the Aristotelian sense, a real being in itself, like a horse, a tree or a man, but a composite of the actions, passions, and reactions of the various men who constitute it. Without being unreal or just a passive effect of individual actions, it was nevertheless a substantia secunda, a form of existence more tenuous and indirect than that of the individual, living and concrete substance. It was a substance like the genres and species, entities that do not exist in themselves but only in the beings that embody them. Society was, in short, what is called a universal: the set of beings who live together under the same system of rules and habits. Therefore, in the traditional definition of society, the strong term, the active subject, the concrete character, was man. Society remained receded like a backdrop, which could limit human actions or change the course of their effects, but could not properly determine them. For action is an attribute of substance, and the substance in the strict sense – the living corporeal individuality – possessed the property of action in a much more direct and real sense than the derived and secondary substance of a mere universal: if it is the horses that kick and not the horse-ness, similarly it is the concrete man who acts, not society.

This definition seemed – and the intent with which I say “seemed” will become clear soon – it seemed to be based on the idea that the human nature of each of the members of society does not depend on the society in which he lives, but is a given and fixed fact. Now, the advent of historicist thought, as we saw above, had as one of its first and most devastating consequences the shaking of general confidence in the immutability and universality of human nature. As a result, the idea of society as a mere system of relations also began to seem unsustainable. If the individual did not have a given nature, but was the result of a process, then the active subject of social life was no longer “man”, but “society”: from abstract universal, society was promoted to concrete substance, real, agent, while the individual was increasingly seen as mere abstraction, as a mere empty algebraic sign whose value will be determined by the result of a social equation. Hence, for the political thinkers of the 18th century, the agent of History was not the flesh-and-blood characters, but the abstract collective concretized and hypostatized under the name of volonté générale.

This conclusion seemed very logical, at the time, but of course it is based on a distorted interpretation of ancient political thought. The confusion clears up as soon as we distinguish between sociality and society – a distinction that the theorists of the volonté générale ignored. Because they ignored it, they believed that the fact of social life altering the habits or personality of concrete individuals proved an essential mutability, an inconsistency and tenuity of human nature. Now, the ancients, and Aristotle more than all, insisted on the fundamental sociality of man and, in doing so, they could not at the same time deny the weight of social factors in shaping human characters and naively believe in a universal immutability of man. Aristotle’s detailed descriptions of the characters, habits and prejudices of various social groups, provided in the Rhetoric, are more than sufficient to debunk the myth that the ancients believed in a fixed human nature immune to the influence of society. If man, according to the Stagirite, acquired or lost characteristics by becoming rich or poor, military or civilian, or even simply by growing old, it is clear that he did not have an immutable nature. The only immutable traits Aristotle saw in man were those contained in his very definition – animality endowed with rational potential – and the properties immediately derived from this definition, among which sociality; and from the definition of sociality, in turn, necessarily included the capacity that man has to alter himself, to transform himself, by effect of social life. In other words: man was immutably, and by nature, mutable according to social conditions. Despite, therefore, all the objectivist inclination of Greek thought, there was no essential incompatibility, except only apparent and superficial, between it and the new conquests of historicism. Many of these conquests, as we saw above, echoed, with a delay of two thousand years, Aristotle’s appeal against abstract universalism and in favor of a science turned towards living reality.

But, as the dead don’t argue, it was easy to attribute to them the belief in an absurdly absolute immutability of human nature, to then base on the contestation of this belief the new theory of the volonté générale (general will). Thus, from the historicist appeal to the particular, to the concrete, to the living, we arrived at a personalization of the abstract, making the “society” the “real subject” of historical action.

Bertrand de Jouvenel points out the historical opportunism that enshrined this transformation into dogma:123

"[...] the theory of Sovereignty brings to power an excessive and dangerous reinforcement. [But] the dangers this theory entails cannot fully manifest while the fundamental hypothesis that gave it birth persists in our minds, that is, the idea that men are reality and that Society is a convention_. This opinion supports the idea that the person is an absolute value, next to which Society only plays the role of a means._

"For metaphysics to affirm the reality of Society, it was first necessary for it to take on the figure of Being, under the name of Nation.

"This was perhaps the most important outcome of the French Revolution. When the Legislative Assembly plunged France into a military adventure that the monarchy could not have risked, it became clear that Power did not have the means to face Europe. It was necessary to ask for almost total participation of the people in the war, something unprecedented. But in the name of what? Of a deposed king? No. In the name of the Nation: and, as patriotism had for two thousand years taken the form of attachment to a person, the natural inclination of feelings made the Nation assume the character and aspect of a person, whose traits were set by popular art.

"This conception of a Whole that lives its own life, and is superior to its parts, was probably latent. But it crystallizes suddenly.

"It is not the throne that is overthrown, but it is the Whole, the character Nation, that ascends to the throne.

"The belief in a character Nation, natural holder of Power, was accepted in France, then spread throughout Europe.

"It is in the full flowering of German national sentiment that Hegel formulates the first coherent doctrine of the new phenomenon, and grants the Nation a certificate of philosophical existence. What he calls ‘civil society’ corresponds to the way Society had been felt until the Revolution. There, individuals are the essence. What he calls ‘State’ corresponds, on the contrary, to the new concept of Society".

Neither Hegel, nor the theorists who soon afterwards founded the social sciences on the assumption of a substantial autonomy of the social Whole in relation to its human constituents, realized the ridiculousness of taking as a self-evident scientific principle the publicity pretext that a semi-crazed Assembly had resorted to in a rush to justify the aberration of universal military recruitment. But man gets used to everything, and habit, once acquired, comes to be taken as an expression of an eternal and self-evident law: just as we have grown fond of the belief that the State has the right to send every citizen to the battlefield — an idea that would have seemed monstrous to Julius Caesar, Louis XIV, or even Genghis Khan —, we also got used to taking as a patent truth the silly lie according to which “Society” is a whole, a real substance, more real than the individuals who compose it, and that individual personalities are nothing more than an epiphenomenon of the social structure.

But, up to that point, “History” was still at least the History of something; it was the action of a subject that, although collective and abstract, remained referred to the concrete existence of singular beings. With Hegel, even “society” will leave the stage, to give preeminence to an even more abstract character: the subject of History will be… History itself.

That’s because, once he had decided to grant the State (= political society, or Nation) the supreme degree of reality in the ontological hierarchy, the philosopher of Jena faced a small obstacle: the State, in the sense in which he defined it, was a relatively recent phenomenon in History. Its birth had been, in any case, much later than that of humanity. How would it be possible for the most real of beings to be the last to appear? Hegel escapes the problem through recourse to the Aristotelian theory of entelechy, disguised in new terminology that makes it appear very original and strictly Hegelian. If the State is the last thing to appear, it is because it is the most perfect and finished form towards which all previous evolution tends. To speak like Aristotle, the last in the order of appearance is the first in the order of being. Hegel translates this to Wesen ist was gewesen ist: “the essence is what the thing finally becomes”, and everyone thinks he is speaking a great novelty, when what he is doing is just applying — very poorly — an Aristotelian precept. Yes, because entelechy, the final form to which the being tends in its evolution, only becomes evident when the process reaches its climax, after which decline begins. Now, a climax in a strict sense exists only in the domain of biological growth, where after the maturity of the being comes aging and death, precisely because the biological being has a predetermined average duration. This average does not exist in History, which is, in principle, a process of indefinite duration. Even Christ, asked about the date of the end of the world, replied that it was a mystery known only to God the Father. Hegel, to apply the concept of entelechy to History, then had to practice one of the greatest philosophical tricks ever known: he marked the end of human History for his own time, and forged the signature of God the Father on the promissory note, falsifying Jesus Christ’s endorsement. To preserve the logical integrity of his system, he decreed the end of History, thus literally realizing the sentence that for the ancients was only a matter of joke: pereat mundus, fiat philosophia (let the world perish, let philosophy be done).

As, in this scheme, the State was no longer the name of an entity but only a phase of its existence, the conclusion was that the supreme reality resides precisely in that entity whose ultimate destiny is to transfigure itself into the State. The name of this entity is History. However, History is becoming, it is a process, and not an entity. Therefore, the only true entity is the non-entity, it is the happening. And since this happening does not have a subject with any ontological consistency in itself and outside of it, the result is that the happening is promoted to the condition of subject itself. There is no longer being, nor universe, nor man, nor anything else: the only reality is the happening that happens to the happening, the History that is the History of History. And in case all this seemed too vague, verbose, and stratospheric, Hegel pointed to the final result, corporeal and present, which attested to the existence of the process and the final consummation of the centuries: the modern State. Having said this, nothing more was said to him, nor was he asked anything else, mainly because History was already about to end, and its philosopher, advanced in years, had a ticket booked to the realm of shadows, where, with the absence of a “before” and an “after,” no one would have the audacity to ask him what would come after the end of History. At the hour of his death, Hegel could have said to his disciples, like Gurdjieff: “Vous voilà dans de beaux draps!”

Hegel was however no fool to sincerely believe that he was indeed the last philosopher and that History would end in the last volume of his system. The one who said: “If the facts contradict my theory, so much the worse for the facts," was just one of those depressing cases in which a vein of intellectual dishonesty persists in a man gifted with genuine philosophical genius.124 A certain dishonesty already appears at the very basis of his metaphysics, where he proclaims that the concept of being, while indeterminate, is equivalent to nothing125 — surreptitiously granting absolute ontological validity to this judgment which only has gnoseological sense, that is, confusing the order of being with the order of knowing. This, in a man of his truly virtuosic logical ability, can’t be an involuntary mistake, but only a deliberate trick.126 But where there is intellectual deceit, there is also, inseparably, some grosser, more material form of dishonesty: recent research has shown that Hegel, who declared himself a faithful Protestant and was never a member of any esoteric group or secret society, nevertheless received money from Masonic associations interested in promoting the idea of a State Religion to replace the Christian Church (Catholic or reformed).127 With exquisite sophistic skill, the author of the Philosophy of History argues, in fact, in favor of Christianity, but emphasizing that, as the modern State incorporates and realizes in its laws the perfect essence of Christianity, the Church has become unnecessary and the State becomes the supreme religious authority.128 This does not make Hegel a hired intellectual, for the opinion he expresses there is not only that of whoever pays him, but also his own. But to what extent did the financial reward not help blind the philosopher to inconsistencies that he would otherwise have noticed? For if on the one hand there is no doubt about the sincerity with which he defends the freedom of individual conscience, on the other hand it is a fact that, by making the modern State the necessary and sufficient condition of this freedom – failing to defend it against the State itself –, he ends up placing himself, somewhat dizzily, at the service of the cause that most clearly characterizes the politics of the Antichrist on Earth: investing the State with spiritual authority, restoring the worship of Caesar, banishing from this world the inner freedom which is the kingdom of Christ.129

This cause is generally associated with communism. But it was incorporated by all three forms of the modern state: communist, Nazi-fascist, and liberal. All three have equally striven to replace the Church in the spiritual guidance of the people: the first, by physical and psychological violence, banning cults, shooting religious people, institutionalizing the teaching of atheism in schools, closing temples, appointing puppet cardinals to deceive the few remaining believers. The second, even more blatantly, through the compulsory worship of the Nation and the State. But the liberal state, which nominally professes religious freedom, is the most efficient of the three in combating religion, as evidenced by the fact that the masses, having retained their religious faith under Nazi-fascist and communist oppression, easily yield to the appeal of “new ethics” disseminated by the entertainment industry in modern democracies, and abandon, along with religion, even the most obvious precepts of natural law: freely exercising their “human rights” under the protection of the democratic state, women who carry out one and a half million abortions a year in the US will soon surpass the genocide rates of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Much more efficient than the tyranny of Hitler and Stalin is the regime that, by legalizing and protecting all tyrannical and self-worshipping demands of each human ego, produces millions of little Stalins and Hitlers. On the other hand, cleverly compensating for the imbalance that the unchecked release of desires could cause, the neoliberal state produces new repressive codes that, unleashing the violent reaction of the superego on morally innocuous targets (smoking, stolen kisses, street harassments, machismo, common vocabulary, jokes), provide an Ersatz of satisfaction to the natural impulse of human morality, preventing it from expressing itself in a straightforward condemnation of a state of affairs marked by mandatory and universal deceit. A society that indeed punishes a lustful gaze and provides police protection for the murder of babies in their mothers' wombs is, in fact, the most exquisite moral monstrosity humanity has ever known. It is also clear that the neoliberal state does not do this by dictatorial means, but with the support and even at the request of voters fully enjoying their right to demand and legislate. Hovering above everyone, imposing nothing, it merely wisely regulates conflicts of interest, which, whipped up to exasperation by the constant stimulus to the spirit of claim, can only be governed through leveling to the bottom, which eventually leads to the establishment of an inverted morality. It is also clear that every new claim results in new laws, that each new law results in a new extension of the ruling, fiscal and judicial bureaucracy, and that, step by step, driven by the infernal dialectic of claiming, the state, without ceasing to flaunt the prestige of the democratic legend, ends up intruding into all sectors of human life, regulating, supervising and punishing even looks, laughs, and thoughts. And, the moment it regulates the inner lives of individuals, the neoliberal state finally fulfills the Hegelian program to the letter, establishing itself as the supreme spiritual, moral, and religious authority, reigning over souls and consciences with the new Decalogue of human rights and political correctness. Beaux draps which constitute the essence of the Hegelian inheritance.

Chapter 8 – The Gnostic revolution

§23 Review of the itinerary traveled

Has the reader, at this point, lost the thread of the story? Let’s review the journey we’ve taken. We were trying to restore the internal coherence of José Américo Motta Pessanha’s mental universe. As we saw, there was not there the type of solidity required of philosophical systems, which allows them to emerge unscathed, in whole or in part, from the attacks of rational criticism; nor the one expected from scientific hypotheses, which consists of resisting confrontation with observed facts. But a completely incoherent thought could not have the almost hypnotic persuasiveness that Motta Pessanha’s had. Therefore, there had to be some coherence there, which, not being of the logical-scientific type, could only be aesthetic or practical. Aesthetic coherence: where the truths affirmed contradict each other and are contradicted by the facts, there can still be some at least apparent beauty, that is, the mutual confirmation of the sensations that coexist, producing a feeling of harmony. Practical coherence: among the sentences that contradict each other, there can however be the unity of a practical interest, which can only be satisfied through falsehood and incoherence. The aesthetic coherence, as we have seen, was weak, it did not resist a closer examination that, behind the beautiful words, showed us the prospect of endless horror (§§ 14 and 15). Therefore, the standard that unified the set was not aesthetic. So, all that remained for us was the hypothesis of the practical objective: Pessanha’s discourse had no satisfaction to provide to existing reality, since what it intended was to produce a new one. Its key was not truthfulness, but persuasive effectiveness. It was not about proving, but about suggesting to compel to an action. Which action? The goal was not absolutely clear, but this did not seem to bother the audience in the slightest. With evident satisfaction, they allowed themselves to be persuaded, without asking what, and led, without asking where. We then saw (§15), that this phenomenon, strange as it seemed, was quite logical, since the ultimate goal of Epicureanism could not be declared aloud without causing astonishment and horror, and therefore the Epicurean proposal had this peculiar characteristic: to recruit its most enthusiastic followers precisely among those who understood it least, since understanding it would be rejecting it. As a result, the task of the Epicurean preacher was not to expose the doctrine, but, on the contrary, to hide it, covering it with a cloak of ingenious subterfuges. Only in this way could he persuade the disciples that he was leading them on the path of happiness, when in truth he was leading them to nihilism, despair, and death.

But, as we found out, Epicureanism did not alone occupy the entire mental horizon of Motta Pessanha. There, it merged with Marxism. After demonstrating (§§16 and 17) the perfect compatibility between Marxism and Epicureanism, as philosophies of the praxis that only touch the real world as an excuse and means to reach the invented world, we finally came to the conciliation of the seemingly irreconcilable: escapism and activism, occultism and revolution, New Age and Cultural Revolution. These opposites, married and reduced to the unity of a common rejection of theoretical intelligence, constituted the filling of José Américo Motta Pessanha’s two brain lobes. The time had long passed when Arthur Koestler could divide the world’s ideological cake into two opposing and irreconcilable halves, personifying them in the antagonistic types: the yogi and the commissar — the one who seeks the truth in another world and the one who strives to change this world in the image of his own truth.130 On the MASP podium, there rose before us, with all its massive improbability, the synthetic and bifront creature, yogi-commissar, Epicurus-Marx, preaching to us the activism of evasion and the evasion through activism (§18). This synthesis was the secret of the mysterious attraction that Pessanha exerted on an audience tired of reality and unable to transform it.

But there arose an obstacle: the yogi is spiritualist, the commissar is materialist. As much as the common rejection of the real world brings them closer, they remain separated by the abyss of a deep metaphysical incompatibility. We then saw that, since it was impossible to jump this abyss, it was necessary to line it with some type of cotton that cushioned the fall, leading individuals to believe that they were rising to a higher view of things when in fact they were just feeling the natural dizziness of a falling body. Paragraphs 19 to 22 showed us that the enthronement of new gods allowed men’s spiritual aspirations to be channeled into the worship of Nature and History, blocking their access to strictly spiritual conceptions. This does not resolve the contradiction, but dulls it to the point of making it almost insensible: when the yogi no longer seeks the infinite, but the cosmos, he is close to being able to understand the commissar; and when the commissar elevates History into an ontological reality superior to concrete men, he becomes the priest of a new cult, which, being unable to be spiritual, is cosmic; and between the two cults, that of the gods of space and the gods of time, there is no practical incompatibility but momentary and apparent, since in the end they celebrate the same forgetfulness of the eternal, the same definitive immersion of the human spirit in the circle of samsara.

Holding the keys to two kingdoms, the yogi-commissar thus transcends his personal and intellectual insignificance, becoming, amidst general applause, the personification of the future. After all, what dream captivates and fascinates today’s humanity more than the aspiration to a society that combines the ideals of socialism and capitalism, giving each human being, simultaneously and inseparably, the feeling of “ethical” participation in a revolutionary epic and the pleasures of consumerist escape? More than a leader or a guru, the yogi-commissar is a symbol onto which the most potent aspirations of our time towards utopia are projected.

But — woe to us! — this character is not new in History. He has already passed through this world, and when he did, he did not leave behind a garden of delights, but a trail of insanity and cruelty. The synthesis of the cult of the cosmos and the cult of History does not emerge — woe to us! — in the hour before dawn, but in the uncertain light that heralds a long night. For us, as for the pygmies of New Guinea, the gods of space and time are not an object of springtime worship in the infancy of the world, but the principle of decline, the sign of a tragic rupture between Existence and Meaning, which initiates a long and fatal decomposition of the spirit and ends with the dispersion of the tribe into wandering groups of terrified and defenseless men.

The historical-cosmic god, the god of Motta Pessanha, has already passed twice through Western History. The first time, he was personified in Caesar, the god-emperor. The second time, he took the name of gnosticism, the corpse of the imperial religion pestering the first six centuries of Christianity with the vapors of its decomposition. However, with the fulfillment of the historical term, Motta Pessanha’s prophecy announces, over Christ’s tomb, the resurrection of Caesar.

§24 The veil of the temple

“All the apparatus of powers, the reason of state, temporal powers, political powers, authorities of all kinds, intellectual, even mental, do not weigh an ounce before a movement of one’s own conscience” – CHARLES PÉGUY

Gnosticism was, in its origin, a religious sect, or rather, an amalgam of different and even conflicting religious sects united by a double common feeling: hatred for Christianity, nostalgia for the Greco-Roman tradition. If we remember that this tradition had deep roots in the Egyptian-Babylonian past, it will be easy to understand Gnosticism, more broadly, as a global reaction of the ancient religious mentality against emerging Christianity. To explain the meaning, the breadth, and the depth of this reaction, whose repercussions propagate to this day, we must ask what was so new and strange about Christianity, so radically hostile and incompatible with the ancient mentality as a whole — and not only with its particularly Greco-Roman version — that it would trigger such a “return shock".

The question seems immense and complex, but its answer is quite simple because there is a differentia specifica of Christianity that is immediately apparent upon initial examination and provides a sufficient reason to justify the depth of the abyss that separates Christianity from the ancient world and explains the continuous violence that the latter opposed to the new revelation and, after twenty centuries, continues to oppose it, under an impressive variety of manifestations. Once this difference is identified, Gnosticism appears, with dazzling clarity, as the common source and inspiration of an inexhaustible multitude of movements, schools, and doctrines that, over two millennia, have turned against Christianity from many sides.

The difference to which I refer, if it resided in the doctrinal content of Christianity, would only pit religion against religion, dogma against dogma, much like the differences that oppose, for example, Islam to Judaism, or the various Christian denominations among themselves, as different species of the same genre. But no. The chasm between Christianity and ancient religion is deeper. It is not about two different religions, two species of the same genre in conflict with each other: it is about two incomparable genres. The difference is so profound that the use of the same term — “religion” — to designate such heterogeneous phenomena should be avoided to prevent confusion.

The difference is, therefore, in the form of the respective phenomena.

All the great religions preceding Christianity have a common characteristic, absent in Christianity: in them, a religious worldview crystallizes into a specific social structure, taken itself as the embodied expression of the truth of this worldview. In other words, the socio-political organization was itself the incarnate truth — there being no possibility of a truth outside of the collective belief. There, right belief and the obedient integration of the individual into the social order were one and the same thing. Not that individual thought was suppressed, as it would be later and as it is today in societies of various types: it is that individual thought simply did not exist; there was no space where the consciousness of the individual could develop outside of the collective belief. The concept of an objective truth, universal, independent of any specific social order, and accessible to free individual consciousness, does not appear in history before Greek philosophy. Socrates is, in the succession of times, the first man who explicitly affirms the sovereignty of individual consciousness, its superiority even in relation to belief materialized in the social order, insofar as society can only have access to schematic and symbolic truths, while the individual reaches, through the Socratic dialectic, the direct, non-symbolic vision of universal truth. The individual who arrives at truth has, when proclaiming it, an authority superior to that of society, for he speaks in the name of the universal, absolute, and supra-quantitative, while society speaks only in the name of the general, a quantitative and merely symbolic form of the universal. If the gods of the community dwelt in temples and squares, the god of Plato resides only in the pure metaphysical intellection of the philosopher. This is the same as saying that the Greek gods were but the embodiment of cosmic forces, derived and secondary, while the God of Plato, the Supreme Good, was the Absolute itself, inaccessible to public worship and only known, finally, by philosophical intellection. The Unity of a supra-cosmic Absolute appears here as an esoteric truth, in the face of the exoteric worship of cosmic powers. The bearer of esoteric truth is, thus, in front of society, in an ambiguous position: on the one hand, he is a man like the others, a member of the polis, subject to worship and laws. On the other hand, he is the spokesperson for a true God, of whom those gods that appear in public worship are only distant echoes and images. Here appears, with dazzling clarity, the tragedy of legitimate spiritual authority placed in front of a temporal power to which an old cult, already amputated of all heavenly root, conferred, by antiquity, a kind of symbolic spiritual authority. The sage owes, on one hand, obedience to laws and customs, lest he wishes to be excluded from the human community; he owes it, on the other hand, to the true God, of whom the community only knows distant analogies and symbols, crystallized in rites and commandments whose meaning has been lost.

For us today, free from the pressure of Athenian local society, it’s easy to agree with Socrates, unilaterally, especially because our adherence to the inner truth that he represented is, almost always, verbal and pro forma. But Socrates himself gave some reason to his executioners, implicitly acknowledging that the inner truth should remain internal; that the external worship, however deteriorated and empty of any spiritual content, retained its rights until the moment came to tear the veil of symbols to display urbi et orbi the supreme secret. Socrates, bearer of a spiritual message, had not come to the world, after all, to found a new religion, but only to bear witness, as a human individual, to a universal truth transcendent to any local cult. Three essential aspects stand out in his message: first, it is universal, valid for all rational beings and not only for a particular community; second, it is apodictic, based on evidence and not on mere opinion; third, its representative and spokesperson is the individual as such, the reflective, philosophical consciousness of the independent man, and not the socially constituted authority or the historically existing community.

Now, what Socrates proposes to a small group of philosophers, without any pretension of transforming his teaching into a new public cult, is precisely what Christianity will offer to all men: direct access to the knowledge of the divine Word, without the intermediation of the polis or the State. Christianity, first of all, does not address men as members of a community, but as conscious individuals and masters of their freedom; second, it does not propose to them a new system of rites and symbols, but the direct experience of the divine Word, a certainty superior to all dialectical proof; third, it offers it as a universal truth, valid for all men and not only for a few situated in a moment and place in history. The only difference is that Socrates resigned to this inner truth remaining secret, while Christianity revealed it publicly, summoning all men to seek direct access to the Word, without the mediation of civil authority, in open defiance of all state cults. Christianity, in short, radically desacralized the State, at the same time as it consecrated, as the bearer of the divine Word, the soul of the human individual. It is significant, in the New Testament, the passage in which St. Paul the Apostle, having learned that newly baptized Christians were disputing something among themselves in the Roman court, warns them not to submit to the judgment of civil authority, for it does not belong to it to judge “those who will judge the world”.131

At the same time, Christianity removed the divine from the historical and cosmic framework in which the Greco-Roman imagination had imprisoned it, restoring the concept of a supracosmic god, transcendent to all sensible representations. The religion of the Empire, a condensation of Greek, Roman, and barbarian cults, ultimately consisted of a dialogue between the human community and the cosmos. On one hand, the common thought of men gathered in the agora or the forum; on the other, the cosmic forces, sometimes favorable, sometimes adverse, which weigh on human destiny and among whose demands the community must make its way. Christianity breaks this two-dimensional world, inaugurating the vertical dimension of depth and height, inaccessible to both the communal imagination and the sensible representations of cosmic deities: on one hand, the inner depth of individual consciousness, the secret enclosure of the intimacy of man with himself; on the other, the infinitude, the eternity, beyond time and the cosmos. The vertical dimension of the soul and God, superimposed on the horizontal confrontation of society and the cosmos, is precisely one of the meanings of the symbolism of the cross. To the moral and cosmic dimension of the ancient religion, Christianity superimposed the spiritual and metaphysical dimension.

Not that this dimension was totally unknown to the ancient world. We find signs of it in Greek mythology, probably inheritor of eastern traditions where metaphysical consciousness remained intact. But, omitted by public worship, it ended up taking refuge in philosophical consciousness and in mystery cults: it became esoteric. Repeatedly philosophers tried to rescue its memory, showing, behind the pantheon of cosmic deities, the existence of a higher reality to which the symbols of the cult alluded covertly. Christianity exoterized it, revealing to all men the secret that had become the privilege of the wise and the mystics, an opening that the Gospel symbolizes as a tear in the veil of the temple.

It is evident that the metaphysical dimension cannot be fully encompassed by the legalistic discourse of religious morality and by the symbols of public worship; it implies, beyond the symbolic veil of rites and laws, a meaning that can be grasped by pure metaphysical intelligence but is irreducible to both concrete representation and the attempts at a finished doctrinal formulation. The divine reality has often been compared to water, which momentarily takes the shape of a glass, to transform itself while nevertheless remaining intact, when poured into another container. Public cults are vast systems of symbols, rites, and myths, which contain this water while simultaneously hiding it. Interwoven and sometimes identified with moral customs, legal and political institutions, they tend, due to the human and historical residue they carry, to enclose themselves in a rigid and self-sufficient totality. Subject to the law of entropy, like everything that exists in space-time, they end up secularizing the divine and divinizing the world, equalizing everything in the flatness of the social and historical: on one hand, they absorb the inner consciousness of men, neutralizing it in collective speech; on the other hand, they block the access path to the divine, populating the heavens with figures of heroes and gods projected from the Earth: divinized enlargements of the State and physical nature. The container closes, preventing men from drinking.

But the aspiration to infinity seems inherent in the human constitution. It can be suppressed, diverted, narcotized by “cosmic” or “historical” substitutes, but it cannot be abolished forever. Hence the history of religions is dotted with cyclical ruptures, which cut the horizontal linearity of historical causes by the vertical of a superior intervention: the advents of new prophet-legislators, who break the closed unity of old institutions, inaugurating new historical worlds and redeeming lost spiritual possibilities. Prophecy is the cyclical return of the world’s spring.

It is only the banality of today’s world that can conceive of prophets as mere predictors of future things. The term “prophet” itself comes from the Greek prophero, which means “to make”, “to produce”, “to determine”. The prophet is an active force, not an observer. He determines the course of events, he turns the knob of historical happenings, giving it a completely new direction, generating effects of a scale incomparably superior to the causal forces hitherto active. He determines a sudden elevation of the level of historical becoming, where suddenly a profusion of scattered, chaotic and irreconcilable forces unifies in a new direction of human life, giving a meaning to chaos and illuminating with a new light the permanent goal of existence. 132

It happened that, in the Christian message, this new meaning could only be grasped by the individual untethered from the bonds that tied him to society and the state, by the individual who, assuming his freedom, also assumed the responsibility to be, without any external tutelage or guarantee, the bearer of the Logos, the conscious holder of the criterion of truth, the solitary interlocutor of the God who “searches the kidneys and hearts”, before whom man stands naked and truthful just as on the day he was born. By proposing to man an effort that is neither geared towards satisfying individual appetites nor improving society, Christianity opens a gap between physical individuality and social identity, the space of inner freedom, to be filled by the development of self-consciousness. This development is impossible as long as the entire horizon of attention is occupied, on one side, by selfish natural impulses, and on the other, by social idealism (precisely the two pillars to which modern moral is intended to be reduced). It is in this space that human personality flourishes, the supreme fruit of History. It coincides, structurally, with that gap that Christianity opens between individual and society by proclaiming in the Epistle to Diognetus (2nd century), that each Christian is a stranger in his own homeland. Sociality is thus hierarchically subordinated to the solitude where God resides: the assembly of those who gather in the name of Christ is an assembly of men who deeply know the solitude of their hearts, and who precisely because of this can gather in Christ and not in mere babble. On the other hand, this gap also corresponds to a certain separation that Christianity establishes between consciousness and body, through a painful moral discipline, certainly, but as necessary to the flowering of self-consciousness as social isolation. What can be questioned is whether this discipline has the definitive moral value of a universally valid code of conduct, and not just that of pedagogy; but that it is absolutely necessary for the emergence of self-consciousness, it is: and it is not surprising that an era accustomed to unrestrained sexual freedom is also fertile in philosophers who deny the existence or value of self-consciousness.

It is easy to understand that this revolution of human self-image promoted by Christianity had the traumatic impact of cutting the umbilical cord in the Greco-Roman world. The advent of Christianity marked the end of the era of the protective priestly state and ushered in the era of the autonomous and solitary religious man. The fundamental importance of monasticism (monakos = monk = solitary) in the development of the new civilization is an eloquent sign of the basic content of its vocation. Not only does the Empire become populated with monasteries, but there is a true race to the desert: thousands of hermits escape from urban chatter, not to seek the artificial consolations of Epicurus’s Garden, but to experience in extreme solitude access to a new depth of inner life. It’s not just about a retreat. They go in search of a regenerative spirit and, upon returning to their fellows, bring it with them. It is from these men who fled the world that the new world is born.

This new world is composed of autonomous units — cities, villages, monasteries, rural properties — separated from each other by immense distances and without any other connection between them except common obedience to the same religion. No administrative, economic, or military unit. Only the subtle and voluntary bond of faith, which expands invisibly to encompass the entire European territory, always by the work of solitary men, who act moved by a personal impulse and almost without communication with the central religious authority in Rome or Byzantium. The phenomenon is astounding. How could the new civilization survive, grow, powerfully assert its values, under such conditions? There is no other explanation than the ceaseless, tenacious, and silent activity of thousands of monks scattered across the territory, bound to their faith by an inner bond far more powerful than any external obedience to a ruler.133 The very notion of authority and hierarchy was subjected to a strange mutation:

"It is a kingdom not framed by space and time, but extended in eternity, not founded on domination but on communion, not integrated by subordination but by participation, not existing primarily in institutions and external acts (although manifested in them) but living originally in the intimacy of each one, and not maintained by power but by authority that identifies with the service to the community."134

The new world must have seemed mysterious, chaotic, and hostile to classes and people accustomed to imperial order. You can get a picture by imagining how an American senator would feel, suddenly snatched from the security of the State, and thrown into the Amazon interior, among Indians and friars. What use would be the discourse on rights, the appeal to the courts, the trust in the omnipresent power of civil authority there? All he would have left there would be to be a man and trust in God. Trust in God was enough for the hermit in the desert night, among winds, demons, and beasts. But what is a Roman patrician, without the Empire that gives him his identity, his place of honor not only in the Army and the Senate but in the priestly caste, his sense of orientation and family dignity? He is a lion without his claws, left to the savagery of hyenas.

The new spiritual world emerges in an exterior panorama of sinister desolation. Only the man of faith can see therein the seed of a glorious future. To him who sees it from the outside, from the viewpoint of the ancient world, it promises nothing but increasing darkness, the dissolution of the Empire’s sacred values at the hands of the invading barbarian hordes.

It is particularly understandable, the horrified reaction of the learned and the priestly caste. The type of inner life that the monks brought was so different from anything the ancient world knew as philosophy, on one hand, and as religion, on the other, that Christianity could not but appear to these people as the very denial of culture, of letters, and even of virtue in general.

The monks, first of all, did not concern themselves with letters, nor did they cultivate philosophical debates, showing a disdain for “worldly wisdom” that could not help but seem, from the outside, the affectation and arrogance of barbarians. Secondly, they cared little for the civic virtues which, in the Greco-Roman context, constituted the very essence of morality. Thirdly, they had traded the complex beauty of the ancient public ceremonies for a strange rite, with terrifying anthropophagic resonances.

However, more serious than everything, Christianity had “rent the veil of the temple”, it had put into circulation themes, symbols, knowledge and attitudes previously reserved for a few initiatory societies which, suddenly, saw the protection of the secret that surrounded them vanish in smoke, and from which they drew a good part of their authority.

Among scholars, nobles, priests, and initiates, Christianity fell like a lightning bolt that provokes astonishment and terror, and, after the initial shock, awakens hatred, rancor, rebellion against fate, an uncontrollable desire for revenge and to restore things as they were before. For the men of the old religion, Christianity was the “stumbling block,” the sudden breach, on the part of the heavens, of a contract that men believed they had sealed forever with the gods.

Cornered by the Christian advance, the ancient spiritual culture is partly absorbed into the new framework, but there is always an unassimilable remnant. This recedes into the shadows, into the underground, where it will strive to keep its forces alive, waiting for a future cycle where it can reemerge. It is almost a law or historical principle: the dethroned exoterism merges into the esoterism of the following cycle, waiting for a resurrection. During the waiting period, it represents the antagonistic and complementary element of the dominant culture — the “shadow” that grows alongside the new body of civilization, ready to engulf it when the twilight hour comes. Every declining civilization experiences a return of religious themes abandoned millennia before, just as the dying body sees the resurgence, with redoubled force, of the diseases it conquered in the past.

The set of beliefs, symbols, values, and attitudes of Greco-Roman spiritual culture, which receded underground with the advent of Christianity, which waged a subterranean war against it for two millennia, undermining its foundations, and which now reemerge in broad daylight for the final battle, is precisely what is referred to as gnosticism.135

§25 Leviathan and Behemoth

It is not possible to delve into a detailed description of the Gnostic phenomenon here, the breadth and variety of which are almost hallucinatory, and can only remotely be accounted for by voluminous studies. But I do not think I am mistaken in pointing out, as common points to a wide variety of Gnostic schools, cosmic religion on one side, and the sacralization of society (or the State) on the other.

To make myself understood, I must resort to a diagram where the vertical represents eternity and the horizontal temporality, as is the case in all universal symbolism of the cross (Fig. 2). In Chinese symbolism, the vertical corresponds to khouen, the “active perfection”, or the metaphysical principle from which everything originates; and the horizontal to khien, the “passive perfection” or cosmic manifestation of this principle. 136 It should be noted that the man referred to here is the Universal Man, the mold of the cosmos — therefore transcendent to the cosmos — and not the empirical individual. On the other hand, the Universal Man is the very essence of concrete individuality, of human singularity.

Figure 2 – Elements of the religious phenomenon

This diagram has no direct connection here with the Christian symbolism of the sacrifice of Golgotha. It simply indicates the four basic elements that are present in all religious conceptions of the world. In each one, there is something like a concept of God, of the Absolute, of the Infinite; a concept of the human soul, its nature, origin, and destiny; a concept of physical nature, or “world” as the scene where the story of this soul unfolds; and, finally, some notion, at least, about the real or ideal organization of human society for the ends the soul must fulfill.

The only fixed element, present in all religions, is God. Sometimes not under this name, sometimes reduced to an abstract metaphysical concept, as in Hinduism, sometimes hidden under a veil of obscurity and silence as in Buddhism, but always present. There is no religion without a more or less direct reference to an Absolute, Eternal, Immutable — a metaphysical Cause or Principle. The other three factors are movable. Religions can be differentiated and classified, very easily and without any inaccuracy, according to the greater or lesser emphasis they place on one or other of these three elements in their relationship with the Absolute and according to the play of dialectical compensations they establish among them. It is clear, for example, that in Judaism the emphasis is on the relationship between God and the human community — the people of Israel — with few references either to the individual soul or to the surrounding nature, or that Buddhism speaks more of the soul than of the other two elements. This does not mean that the less emphasized elements are actually absent — it simply means that these religions take them for granted.

The emphasis of Christianity clearly falls on the vertical axis, on the direct relations between the soul and God. Society and nature lost, at a stroke, their role as interlocutors between the soul and the divine. The singular man, the new Adam, was elevated to lord of the world, in open struggle with the divinities of nature — the djinn of Islamic tradition — and the social powers, which the Bible had condemned in a summary sentence: “The gods of the nations are demons”.

It is therefore clear that the basic reaction against Christianity takes the form from the outset of a struggle for the restoration of nature and society to their previous status — a struggle, therefore, against the human individual, against the soul, against autonomous consciousness. 137 However, it would be wrong to directly identify this struggle as a struggle against the Church, against the Papacy, against the Roman Institution. On the contrary, the consolidation of Roman authority takes place, to a large extent, by Romanizing Christianity, resacralizing society: the Church conquers the world, but allowing itself to be partly conquered by it. The conflict between catechetic expansionism and the preservation of the initial faith accompanies the entire history of the Church — in counterpoint with the perennial ambiguity of the relations between Faith and Empire, spiritual authority and temporal power, symbolized by Dante in the struggle between the eagle and the cross.

Christianity, in fact, did not wish to destroy the Empire, but it could not submit to it; nor did it wish to restore it, but it could not survive and expand except under its protection. René Guénon, who should always be listened to in these matters, explains the phenomenon by saying that Christianity did not originally have the spirit of a religious law, in the Jewish or Islamic sense of a rule for ordering the world, but of an esotericism, a purely interior path: “My kingdom is not of this world”. The exoterization of Christianity, its transformation into a religious law for the whole of society, would have been caused by external circumstances: the decline of Roman religion and Judaism left the Greco-Roman world practically without any religious law — and Christianity, albeit reluctantly, even at the price of betraying in part its interiorizing vocation, had to providentially fill a gap that threatened to widen into an abyss and engulf civilization. Christianity saves the ancient world by absorbing it into a new framework, but in doing so, it has to let itself be absorbed in it and transform itself, through quite deforming adaptations, into a new external Law, the religion of the Empire. 138

We do not need to fully endorse Guénon’s thesis to acknowledge the apparent fact that Christianity, despite its immense force for spiritual renewal, was not particularly well equipped to reorganize civil and political society. The Gospel does not provide an indication, a line, or even a single word about political and economic organization, about exterior morality, about civil and penal law, as found in abundance in the Torah, in the Quran or in the Hindu Scriptures. Christianity was essentially a “path of salvation,” which turned its back on this world, concentrating all efforts in the search for the Heavenly City. To transform into an organizing force for the Earthly City, it had to undergo adaptations that risked deeply distorting it. There is no other case in the history of Religions of a religious morality that has undergone so many changes and transformations. Christian social morality, indeed, does not emerge ready and obvious from the scriptures' letter, like Islamic or Jewish morality, but is gradually developed, through tremendous dialectical disputes, by the work of theologians and councils, growing not as a linear progression of a simple logical deduction, but like a living organism, among pains and contradictions. Thus, for example, we see clerical celibacy – today defended as an essential value for the preservation of faith – not fully instituted before ten centuries of discussions, in a Church whose first pope, the Apostle Peter, was a married man. Even the rite, the plastic expression of faith symbolism, does not have a fixed form: around an essential nucleus constituted by the Eucharist, the mass acquires, over the centuries, a plurality of forms, sometimes with the priest facing away from the public, sometimes facing forward, sometimes the faithful drinking wine and eating bread, sometimes only eating the bread and leaving the wine for the priest, sometimes seated in benches, sometimes scattered standing throughout the church nave, sometimes uniformly facing the East, sometimes in any random direction, sometimes praying in Latin or Greek, sometimes in local languages, sometimes with music, sometimes without music, sometimes confessing summarily in groups, sometimes detailing each one alone with the priest, and so on, in an endless variety, according to the times and ways of mundane History. The uniqueness of this phenomenon is striking when we compare the infinite forms of the mass with the uniform fixity of Jewish ceremonies crystallized once and for all in the form established by the Old Testament; or with the Islamic rite, today exactly the same as when the Prophet Mohammed taught it to the Medina army on its march against the infidels quartered in Mecca, not to mention the multi-millennial immobility of the complex Hindu ritual system.

All of this shows the profound maladaptation of Christianity to the regulatory and civilizing mission it was entrusted with by the course of events. Between congenital maladaptation and the force of external obligation, the result was twofold: on the one hand, a millennial and repeatedly failed effort to raise a Christian Empire, unifying the West. Indeed, in the West there was only a Christian empire, in the global sense, during the reign of Charlemagne. In the rest of European history, the Empire is just a unifying idea, hovering abstractly over a chaos of principalities and duchies perpetually at war with each other. On the other hand, and precisely because of the failure of the Empire, there arises the transformation of the papacy into a competing temporal power, with all its retinue of disastrous consequences. The main one, obviously, was the mundanization of the cult, the reduction of Christian morality to a recipe of exteriorities as oppressive and false as Roman state moralism, the progressive crystallization of doctrine into a depressing logical-juridical formalism and, consequently, the complete politicization of religion in the post-renaissance era, first as monarchic conservatism, which gradually transformed into its opposite: a republican, liberal, and socialist activism.

But it was not only within the Church that the spirit of the Roman world remained active: around it, and against it, Gnostic sects proliferated from the earliest centuries. In them was preserved the spirit of the cosmic religion – the other component of the Greco-Roman state cult. It’s as if the pagan spirit had split in two: its political, historical and legal genius infiltrated the Church’s high hierarchy, while its cosmic religion, its natural gods, took refuge in Gnosticism. Here we have, from the beginning of Christian history, the two enemies that oppose God and the soul: the “world” and the “flesh” – on the one hand the spirit of political society, on the other the worship of the material forces of the cosmos. The alliance of state religion and cosmic religion opposes the alliance of God and man. The socio-cosmic dimension (khien) seeks to subjugate, swallow, and eliminate the spiritual and metaphysical dimension (khouen).

But khien is, in itself, double. The enthronement of the socio-cosmic immediately triggers a new struggle. Who will reign: society or the cosmos, man or external reality, history or nature? The dominant theme of all conflicts of ideas in the West since the Renaissance appears here in all clarity. Once the vertical axis is overthrown, the horizontal cannot remain standing, for there is not between its two terms the flagrant inequality that exists between the human individual and God: history and world, culture and nature, value and fact, can never reach an agreement unless they take as a balance the vertical that points upward to the sphere of metaphysical laws, the limits of the possible and the impossible, and downward, to the desires and aspirations of the singular human soul. Removed from the scene are the soul and the Absolute, leaving only the combat of Leviathan and Behemoth: the spirit of self-idolizing rebellion that commands History, the spirit of blind and mechanical submission to the external nature. A new diagram will show the alternatives in which the West has been wrestling for four centuries:

COSMOS versus HUMANITY

PHYSICAL LAWS versus LAWS OF REASON

EXPERIENCE versus THOUGHT

NATURE versus HISTORY

MECHANICISM versus VITALISM

NATURE versus NURTURE

BEHEMOTH versus LEVIATHAN

I have often wondered if the current and common meanings of “left” and “right,” which political folklore dates from the meeting of the Estates General under Louis XVI, would not have an earlier origin, in the dispute between the two arms of the cross to decide, once the cross had fallen, which would be on top.

It’s surprising, but the history of ideas over the last four centuries can be entirely told as a series of variations, actually quite monotonous, around the theme of the dispute between the two arms of the cross.

Already in the full Renaissance, the antagonism is outlined between natural scientists, firmly determined to abandon the Aristotelian tradition (or what they so named) for new experimental methods, and the humanists, committed to restoring the love for Greek classics. The former broke with the sense of historical continuity of the sciences, believing it possible to make a clean slate and read directly from the Book of Nature. The latter, rediscovering Aristotle’s Poetics, chained literary taste for three centuries in rigid obedience to Aristotelian canons, while at the same time inaugurating, with the critique of texts, the modern historical science. It’s incredible how two movements of antagonistic meaning can have entered the history books with the common denomination of “Renaissance”.139

In the 17th century, the two contrary currents will be officially separated into watertight compartments with the opening of the Parisian faculties of “Letters” and “Sciences”, inaugurating the “two cultures” that C. P. Snow would later talk about.

At the same time, the philosophical debate crystallizes in the antagonism between empiricists and rationalists – the former attributing to the world, to the external object, the origin of all our knowledge; the latter extracting it ready or semi-ready from inside human reason.

In the next century, the birth of historicism marks the beginning of the dispute between the gods of time and the gods of space. The antagonism will only be expressly formulated at the end of the 19th century, with Windelband and Rickert, but in Vico the dispute of priority is already observed: in opposition to physical-mathematical science, History is promoted to the supreme model of knowledge.

Finally, in the 20th century, the conflict between capitalism and communism evolves to the final form of the dispute between the “New Age” and the “Cultural Revolution”. And in the height of this dispute is where the yogi-commissioner enters the scene.

Book V – Cæsar redivivus

Chapter 9 – The religion of the empire

§26 From Hegel to Comte

The yogi-commissioner, embodying the reconciliation between the New Age and the Cultural Revolution, should logically bring us the solution to all these antinomies. This is indeed what he promises us. But it is also clear that he cannot achieve it under any circumstances, since a contradiction, whatever it may be, can only be resolved from a higher third term that encompasses and contains the two opposites; and the yogi-commissioner, unable to rise to the plane of metaphysical universality which is the only one from which the dilemmas of Western culture are unified and resolved, resorts to the classic expedient of neurotics: to numb the conflict by falling into a depressive and self-hypnotic sleep. By narrowing the horizon of consciousness, he expels from his field of vision the fighting forces, and seeks to persuade himself that everything he does not see does not exist. But not even centuries of practice of the tetrapharmakon could prevent us from hearing, behind the soothing words of Motta Pessanha, the threatening roar of the approaching catastrophe: once the image of the eternal disappears from the skies, the struggle between the gods of time and the gods of space will continue until the fatal outcome, which can only be the victory of the strongest. Now, of the two monsters, the strongest is always Behemoth, the order of the physical universe. The defeated is always the human community, unstable and nervous, flailing in the waters, enraged and humiliated, under the crushing weight of the opponent’s paws.

Isn’t it significant that, at the height of the scientific euphoria that celebrated the human community’s dominance over nature, the scientists themselves come to warn us about the imminent dangers that increasingly threaten us from the physical cosmos, and, changing tone, switch from Promethean triumphalism to preaching a resigned and humble “collaboration with nature”?140 They heard the dull thud of Behemoth’s paws, which comes again to crush Leviathan. But all they can do is hastily swap divinities, going from Promethean rebellion to obedient conformity of Eastern bonzes, until the human will to power rebels again, to be crushed again, and so on until the final defeat. No, it is of no use to switch the worship of Leviathan for that of Behemoth. This switch, cyclical and repetitive to the point of hallucination, is itself the problem, the evil that has been shaking and spinning the West for centuries in a mad dance of drunken dervishes who have forgotten Allah and fallen into the idolatry of the dance itself. The two hands of khien stop slapping each other only when they join in common obedience to khouen.

But if the remedy proposed by the yogi-commissioner to quell the vice is just a new injection of the same old drug, then the question arises: Quia bono? Who benefits from this? Who does the yogi-commissioner serve, knowingly or not?

When the French Revolution ended, Auguste Comte, undertaking the accounting balance of the ideological achievements of this great modern event, concluded that the balance was in the red. This color did not refer to the blood spilled between speeches, but to the fact that the Revolution, having cut off along with the king’s head also the moral and religious roots of the Old Regime, had put nothing in its place: with the resulting ideological deficit, the masses felt floating in a despairing spiritual void, which the social conquests were not enough to alleviate.141 What was the solution? To return to Catholicism? Never! Faced with the circumstances, Comte then took a stance that well shows the superiority of modern times: unlike the ancient Jewish prophets, those lazy ones who fled the divine call until Jehovah caught them in a snare between invectives and terrific threats, our philosopher did not shy away, and quickly accepted the task of founding the new cult, a task that had been assigned to him by himself. Needless to say, he died insane.

The new religion would have three main characteristics:

  1. It would be a state religion: the man of the new times would serve the State as in the past the faithful had served the Church.

  2. To mark its break with the previous era, it would institute a new calendar, with festive rites dedicated to the “great men” whose advent to this world marked the decisive stages of “historical progress”.

  3. The new religion would mark the entry of humanity into the decisive stage of its temporal evolution – the “positive era”, marked by the predominance of science and technique, after the initial “mythical era” and the intermediate “metaphysical era”.

In these three characteristics appear the basic traits that define what I called the divinization of time: the identification of religious law with civil law (or the absorption of the Church by the political society), the worship of ancestors, and the concept of the temporal dimension as a field where a predestined progress is realized. In short: Cæsar redivivus.

But the new religion was not so new. Firstly, it simply gave a more detailed expression to the Hegelian idea of the State as successor to the Church: if Comte was the Messiah of the Religion of Humanity, Hegel had been at least its John the Baptist.

To make matters worse, Hegel’s religion was not just an idea: the Revolution managed to fully realize it. On June 7, 1793, the Convention, convened under the presidency of Maximilien Robespierre, voted for a Catechism in fifteen articles. The first acknowledged the existence of the Supreme Being, which distinguished itself from what the Ancien Régime called God by being less a Person than an abstract concept: the god of deism, in short. Articles 2 and 3 established duties towards the Supreme Being: to hate tyrants, to punish traitors, and other such things. The following articles established festive rituals designed to remind man of his dignity and duties. There are thirty-six festivals per year, dedicated to the Supreme Being, the Republic, Justice, Frugality, and other excellent things, including Industry and Agriculture, and four additional celebrations, the main one on July 14th. The first festival, scheduled to coincide with Pentecost Sunday, saw painter Jacques-Louis David in charge of liturgical details, which included a procession, with high priest Robespierre leading, hymns to the “Father of the universe, supreme intelligence”, rain of flowers, cannon fires, and a parade of the Statue of Liberty on a cart pulled by eight oxen.

After this, what else was left for Auguste Comte but to state the obvious? Even the title of the pamphlet in which he disseminates his religious views is copied from the decree of the Convention: Catéchisme. Comte’s religion was not adopted anywhere, except at the forgotten edge of the world: in the Empire of Brazil, where valiant military officers, discontented with the monarchy that did not give due recognition to the Army that had gallantly defeated Paraguayan troops made up of boys aged 8 to 15, dreamt of establishing in the country a republican dictatorship inspired by the motto of the Master: Ordre et Progrès. In Europe, the Religion of Humanity was eventually forgotten, along with its immediate predecessor, the Robespierrian cult of the Supreme Being. But they left behind countless marks, including an inexhaustible civic calendar, which, celebrating secretaries, drivers, mothers, fathers, lovers and tutti quanti, offer two indisputable advantages: they make people forget the liturgical calendar of the Church and they boost business. They actually do more than this: by providing an Ersatz for the religious experience of “qualified time” — special times when the flow of events cyclically changes in tone, reminding man of the relativity of time and the immersion of everything in the eternal142 —, the civic calendar helps to trap the human mind in socio-economic time, in administrative time, elevated to the status of a metaphysical reality. In a social organization where schedules and routines, fruits of human decision, weigh on men with the weight of physical coercion, it is not surprising that an employee on vacation, contemplating the sea and the mountains, imagines dreaming, and that, upon returning to his place in the time clock line, feels a return to “reality”.

With the downfall of Robespierre, his religion went to the grave with him, but the idea remained in the air, exerting a strong appeal to any man to whom power over the realm of this world seemed too narrow an ambition. It ended up being absorbed by the one who buried the Revolution under the foundations of a new Empire: by crowning himself, dispensing with the papal consecration which for centuries had been seen as the indispensable spiritual guarantee for the legitimization of temporal power, Napoleon Bonaparte let the Church know that the times were long gone when the Empire was merely a political competitor to religious authority. Now, the formidable figure of a spiritual opponent was rising against Christianity.

Napoleon ended badly, defeated by a handful of old-style kings, crowned by the Church. But, while he expired in the pain and humiliation of exile, the idea of state religion prospered, in a discreet but decisive way, across the ocean.

§27 Translatio imperii. Brief history of the imperial idea

“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” – S. PAUL APOSTLE

The political history of the West can be, without error, easily summarized as the history of struggles for the right of succession of the Roman Empire. Century after century, we see attempts to renew the greatest achievement of Rome: to unify, under the same legislation and government, a multiplicity of peoples, coexisting in the harmony of their differences and all contributing to the wealth and grandeur of the Empire.

Around this dominant theme, kingdoms and dynasties that arise and vanish, political and cultural revolutions that succeed each other, leaders who see their star shine for an instant to then disappear forever, religious conflicts, travels and discoveries, wars and crises, are nothing but echoes, reflections, the agitation on the surface of the waters, which hides and reveals, at the same time, the deep movement: the struggle for the formation of the Empire.

One of the proofs of the poor state of political theory today is that, among so many discussions of purely formal and even conventional concepts — democracy, nation, legitimacy, sovereignty, rights —, it rarely has time to investigate the current nature of the phenomenon “Empire”. The Empire is not a theory: it is a reality.

It is, first of all, a continuous reality. Except for the period that mediates between the fall of Rome and the reign of Charlemagne, not a day has passed in the history of the West when some nation, people, reign, has not devoted the best of itself to the effort to rise to Empire or as such was not recognized by others. And even in this period, the Empire does not cease to exist: it transfers to Byzantium.

It is, secondly, a problematic reality: in contrast to the stable unity and organic growth of Rome, the Empire of the West, without ever disappearing entirely, dies here to be reborn there, changes its center and contour, antagonists and protagonists, doctrines and methods, always restless, protean, Leviathan nervously stirring in the depths of the waters, always dreaming of the stability of power, always condemned to the metamorphosis of wars, revolutions, changes of peoples and borders.

It is, thirdly, the decisive reality. Whoever follows the history of political ideas in counterpoint to the history of political actions and not as a succession of theories floating in the sky of pure ideas, will verify that there has never been a single doctrine in the West, monarchical or republican, revolutionary or reactionary, slavish or libertarian, which was not absorbed to serve as a pretext and reinforcement in the struggle for the Empire. So strong is the magnetism of the idea of Empire, that others orbit around it as satellites, whose apparent opposition masks only the fact that they rotate around the same axis, serve the same purpose and master. Theocracy and monarchy, republic and democracy, nationalism and internationalism, revolution and reaction, capitalism and socialism, and all those other banners in the name of which men kill and die, when seen not from the point of view of the subjective motivations that move their martyrs, but from the perspective of the real results they serve in the scale of centuries, are no more than the standards of divisions, battalions and squadrons in which the huge army is engaged in a single objective: the formation of the Empire. Western political and religious thinkers have not created a single idea that, sooner or later, did not serve to stimulate or legitimize the struggle for that purpose.

In all the variety of processes and mutations that make up the history of the West, this is the only constant143.

Yes, it is finally a current reality: for a century, two great empires, after having destroyed all the others, disputed among themselves the primacy of the political and cultural unification of the world. The death of one of them elevates the other to a position of world dominance superior to anything their predecessors had dreamed of. From the top of his solitary throne — loved, envied, hated, but always feared —, he goes on unifying and homogenizing humanity, imposing everywhere his laws, customs, values, language, and, wisely administering national differences, is elevated to the status of supreme magistrate of the universe. His only opponent — the Islamic people — stirs only in the depths of their powerless rage, unable to organize, having long since lost the imperial vocation that animated them until the 12th century. It too will end up yielding. Is there any concept more urgently deserving of study than that of “empire”? Everything else is words, beautiful words that, seeming to war against each other — democracy, aristocracy; revolution and reaction; liberalism and social democracy; duties and rights; order and freedom — have done nothing more than help hasten and legitimize the world ascent of the Empire which is at once democratic and aristocratic, revolutionary and reactionary, liberal and social democratic, and which deep down couldn’t care less about these distinctions. Like one of its most famous heroes — Abraham Lincoln —, the Empire is notably devoid of theoretical convictions, except for its unifying mission. Like Lincoln, it will support revolution or reaction, slavery or abolition, puritanical moralism or sexual rebellion, colonial rule or claims of national independence, with the same serenity of knowing that only one thing matters: to save the unity of the State that embodies the project of the American Revolution, to ensure the continuity of the upward march of this Revolution towards the Empire of the world.

The Roman Empire seems to hover over the Western mind like the ghost of a illustrious dead who does not want to finish dying; and that, acting on the souls of the living as a subconscious obsession, makes use of them as instruments of his effort to return to life.

If this return is problematic, if instead of taking the form of a lasting restoration it withers in incessant and bloody attempts that lead nowhere, it is for a series of very simple and clear reasons. In Rome, the Empire forms almost fatally as an evolution of a Republic where a duality of powers — civil and military — had been inviting for centuries to a forced unification, which could only come from the military. These powers, however, were both equally subject to a set of traditional norms of conduct, as well as to the rites of the same public cult. The Empire was built on the moral and religious unity of the Roman people, consolidated by the state religion, in which senators and consuls, generals and emperors personally exercised, in the intervals of their political and military obligations, the sacerdotal functions. Now, this unity did not exist in medieval Europe, where the first attempts to restore the Empire already brought within them the constitutive contradiction that would lead them to failure: they would constitute an effort to graft the Roman institutions onto the framework of a religion that, by its deepest inspiration, repelled with true revulsion the idea of the state cult, among whose victims were, indeed, its founders — the legion of the first Christian martyrs.

The basic problem of Western political history can thus be summed up in the succession of attempts to find a practical response to a practical problem: how to restore the Roman Empire without the Roman state religion?

The Church as a force organizing society was born precisely in the period mentioned above, between the fall of the Empire and the coronation of Charlemagne. In this interval, with no state administration existing, priests had to add to the priesthood, the functions of political leaders, notaries, sheriffs, etc., which ended up making the clergy an informal administrative structure, which covered more or less the territory equivalent to that of the former Empire. The impulse to transfer at least part of these responsibilities to civil authority was one of the reasons that made the Church aspire to a return of the Western Empire. To this was added a series of conflicts between the Papacy and the Byzantine Empire — conflicts that prefigure in miniature those that would manifest between the Church and the Western Empire. Too distant from Byzantium to be able to enjoy imperial protection against the barbarians, too subject to Byzantine authority to be able to refuse it the payment of heavy taxes, the Church of Rome, around the 8th century, begins to dream of a transfer of the Empire to the West:144 and the translatio imperii will be the inauguration of authentic Europe.145

But when it came to reviving the Western Empire in a Christianized version, the clergy, bound by the commitment to celibacy,146 could not simply spring a dynasty from themselves. It was necessary to take advantage of a son of one of the local barbarian nobilities, Christianize and educate the young warrior to make him a Christian king and then a Christian emperor. But, firstly, the noble caste’s resistance to any form of study and to more serious participation in religious activities was a fait accompli. These things were considered unworthy of warriors. This resistance will last at least until the 15th century, creating insurmountable obstacles for the Church’s educational efforts. Secondly, the nobles had a mixed feeling of fear and disdain for the clergy: on one hand, the priests were for them the equivalents of the ancient druids, shrouded in the fearsome prestige of the bearers of magical gifts; on the other hand, to reverential fear was mixed social contempt, since the clergy collected its members from all classes and the nobles could not look favorably upon the former servants who suddenly appeared invested with authority and power. Thirdly, the Church, sponsoring the Empire project, held a primacy over the warrior caste, which entered as a guest. If the ancient Roman emperors were themselves the priests of the state cult, the emperors of Europe will have to settle for the status of rulers granted and legitimized by another caste. Here are the first stumbling blocks, which will give rise to an endless series: the Roman synthesis of the priestly and royal castes had broken down never to return. From this moment until the head of Louis XVI rolls on the ground cut off by the Revolution, the drama of the Western Empire will take the ostentive form of a conflict between the priesthood and the royalty.147

The solution was temporarily found in a family of Frankish nobles who seemed less savage than their peers, and who, recently Christianized, had a more ardent faith without contagions. Pepin of Herstal, subjugating several Frankish provinces and placing himself under the authority of the Church, gives it the base to begin the reconstruction of the Empire. He becomes king of the Franks. To confer on his power the sacred prestige that the previous Gallic tradition attributed to the descent of Clovis, the emissary of the Church, Saint Boniface, anoints his forehead with blessed oil — inaugurating the custom of the consecration of kings. Pepin’s illegitimate son, Charles Martel, rising to power after his father’s death, extends the conquests, which are finally taken to the confines of Latin Christendom by his brother and successor, Charlemagne. The Church draws the political consequences of the fait accompli: the Empire has restored itself in the person of this young two-meter-tall warrior, whose prodigious courage and strength are on a par with his manifest religious faith. Charlemagne is crowned emperor in the year 800. He sees no contradiction in ruling the world and obeying the heavens. Overcoming internal resistance, he even agrees to learn to read, but postpones the fulfillment of the promise and only acquires the first letters at the age of 32, already emperor. If the ancient Roman emperors were considered incarnations of divinities — Julius Caesar was accepted as the carnal descendant of Venus —, the Christian emperor will have to settle for something more modest: Charlemagne considers himself the armed arm of the Church, the earthly executor of Providence’s designs. If there were doubts about these designs, a brief consultation with the priests solved the problem. Despite the manifest sincerity of his faith, Charlemagne still retained some personal habits that give a good measure of the abyss that existed between the mentality of the barbarian nobility and the clergy. He loved his two daughters so much that he feared above all that they would get married and go live far from him. To prevent this from happening, he allowed them to have as many lovers as they wanted, as long as they lived with them within the Palace and never strayed from dear daddy, a liberal avant la lettre. A glutton, prone to fits of rage, cruel with enemies, this giant nevertheless proved capable of extending the domains of the empire, forcibly Christianizing neighboring peoples, and skillfully managing the differences between various national interests — he was an Emperor in the full sense of the term. Despite the proverbial hostility of the nobles to lettered culture, he also had the wisdom to give carte blanche to the monk and philologist Alcuin, so that he gathered the greatest scholars of the time at court, formed a library, edited books, and, more surprisingly, set in motion the first plan for universal literacy that is known in the history of the world. Europe, after four hundred years of dispersion, chaos, and obscurity, reaches its first moment of intellectual and artistic splendor.

But, the problem of the Christian Empire seemed to be solved, and everything heralded a grand future. This future looks even more promising when Charlemagne’s successor, Louis, proves to be strictly attached to Christian morality, severe with himself and with the other nobles, imposing sacrifices in the name of imperial unity and juridical order, and receiving for this the nickname Louis the Pious: the aristocracy seemed to have fully absorbed its role in the Christian Empire. But the fact is that the imperial-Christian synthesis resided only in the personality of Louis, in which the best qualities of the barbaric nobility and fidelity to the Church harmonized by a rare psychological accident. After the Emperor’s death, the Empire did not last a day longer: contrary to a recently promulgated law that prevented the division of Empire lands by inheritance, his successors, in a fatal relapse, demanded partition according to old Gallic traditions: the Empire dismembered, and all the contradictions between nobility and clergy reappeared, which a sequence of fortunate accidents had camouflaged for a while. The first Christian Rome had lasted only the time of three generations.

Meanwhile, in the East, Byzantium prospers, flourishes in wealth, culture, power. When we compare, on one hand, the ease with which the Byzantine Empire settles and stabilizes for a thousand years to once wounded by the invader disappear forever, on the other, the succession of dramatic and bloody attempts to which the West commits – to this day – in an effort to realize the imperial idea, we cannot fail to notice something strange in the fascination that this idea – and the impossibility of realizing it – exerts on the Western mind. No other civilization showed such an absorbing imperial vocation and such a profound incapacity to give this vocation a stable expression.

The second Western Christian Rome – the Holy Roman Empire, founded in 962 by a pact between King Otto I and Pope John XII – will last until 1806. It marks indeed a second translatio imperii – from the French to the Germans – although the term is generally used exclusively for the change from East to West. But it never was more than a project, or, worse still, a comedy. Conceived to meet two objectives – to be the armed arm of the Church and to unite the Christian kingdoms under a central government, at least in the West – it never achieved either. For a millennium, it lived at odds with the Papacy it should represent; many Emperors were not even consecrated by the Pope; more than one Pope was dethroned and persecuted by order of the Emperor; more than one Emperor was excommunicated and humiliated by the Pope. On the other hand, the majority of Christian peoples refused to submit to the Emperor. Four among them – English, French, Spanish, Portuguese – later founded their own empires on the ruins of the old one.

For most of its existence, the Empire was nothing more than a cluster of independent and mutually hostile principalities and duchies. In the time of the last Habsburgs, these autonomous units reached eighteen hundred. When, in 1806, Napoleon ordered the extinction of the old Empire, it only existed on paper.

Why was it like this? The causes of failure are so blatant that it surprises us today that the protagonists did not perceive them in time to try to change the course of events. But to perceive the facts, it is not enough for them to be before us: we need to have the concepts (from con + cepio = “capture together”), the mental schemas that allow us to grasp them in the unity of their relations. And the concepts that today make clear and patent the meaning of these ancient events were a much later invention. Without them, the facts would fly like flies, in chaotic spirals where their contemporaries saw no form or meaning. Not that the ancients were fools, and we intelligent. It’s just easy to understand what’s going on… after it has passed.

In the first place, it was impossible to build a new Empire with a Roman model on economic bases so different from the Roman ones. Let no one be deceived here by words: the regime was “feudal” in one case as in the other. But what a difference between the two feudalisms! The ancient nobleman, like a “colonel” from the Pernambuco backlands, lived in the capital, among his peers, shone in the Senate, went to the theater, his house was frequented by artists, philosophers, beautiful ladies. His sons performed priestly functions, officiated public worship, and then pursued a career in the military. Once or twice a year, he visited his lands, collected the profits, and returned to the city. It was, on a feudal basis, an urban, very cultured and politicized aristocracy.148

With the dissolution of the Empire, the nobles definitively withdrew to their lands and, no longer counting on the protection of a central government, they set about organizing private armies. Each fief closed in on itself in rancorous distrust, not knowing whether to fear more the ambitions of its neighbors or the barbarian hordes that continued to arrive and devastate everything. With the invasions, many of these fiefs changed owners overnight. The boundaries of properties became unstable, they had to be defended by the sword.

The construction of the European Empire faced, from the outset, a wall of impossibilities, and the first one is: how to impose political and administrative unity without an urban aristocracy – without the unity of the ruling class, scattered over a vast territory and divided by hostilities and clashes of irreconcilable interests?

Even more: how to impose unity without a capable ruling class? The remnants of the old nobility forget their habits of culture and refinement; the new ones, of barbarian origin, never had these habits. The aristocracy is now a horde “uncultivated, turbulent, greedy for coarse pleasures and that no power can discipline”.149

In the third place, the ancient Roman feudalism was based entirely on the work of slaves, captured by the millions in wars of conquest and put to serve in true stables, without the right to have personal possessions or to form a family. But the Church itself had changed the fate of these people, winning for them the right to property and marriage, as well as various guarantees against the arbitrariness of the feudal lord. One of the basic duties of the sacred emperor in the year 800 was to defend these rights – which made him unattractive to the majority of the aristocratic class. In any case, Charlemagne managed to make himself obeyed, partly by the terror he inspired, partly by the wars of conquest, whose booty in goods and lands, amply shared among the aristocracy, compensated for the losses resulting from the advantages granted to the serfs. After Charlemagne’s death, his successor, Louis the Pious, found himself in a frightful situation: all properties had been distributed, the treasury was exhausted, there were no new lands to conquer and the law prohibited sharing those of the Empire: it was no longer possible to reign neither by terror, nor by bribery. He had no other weapon than the respect that his personal rectitude inspired – a weapon of dubious efficacy, and which went with him to the tomb: over Louis' corpse, the nobles celebrated the partition of the Empire and, throwing Christian conscience to the nettles, roasted and ate the rights of the serfs.

For a thousand years, the Church will wear itself out between utopian efforts to erect an empire in the clouds and in juggling to hide from the storms that it sends her.

For the first five centuries, the conflict takes the form of a precarious balance of forces, always threatened by static tension, which occasionally explodes into uncontrollable crises. The most serious one occurs between 1296 and 1303, when Pope Boniface VIII, wishing to force unity among the Western princes to undertake a new Crusade, punishes the recalcitrants by refusing to pay them the taxes of the local churches – which was simply to condemn them to bankruptcy. The king of France, Philip the Fair, through legal tricks and violence, manages to partially dodge the siege, and in retaliation the Pope issues the bull Unam sanctam, which declares in no uncertain terms what until now had been delicately implicit: the total submission of the kings to the authority of the Church.150 Philip sends an army to invade the Pope’s palace, Boniface is arrested and physically assaulted, but, released after three days, he returns to the throne with strong popular support. It does no good: old and sick, he dies soon after, and his successor, instead of carrying on the fight with Philip, which was already half won, prefers to sit on the fence, and takes compromise to the point of agreeing to discuss, in a council, the accusations that the crowned little bandit made against the honor of the deceased, only for everything to end in a posthumous pizza.

Boniface, who many people both inside and outside the Church still criticize today for his intransigence and lack of tact, was in fact a genius, a man endowed with an almost prophetic historical foresight.151 He saw in Philip the roots of an evil that the future would magnify to the dimensions of a global tragedy: the appropriation of spiritual authority by armed power, the theft of Christ’s crown by Caesar’s successors152 (we will see this soon when the figure of Henry VIII appears). His bull Unam sanctam, which some idiots point out as an odious manifestation of reactionary clericalism, is simply a defense of the spirit against armed force, and the truths it enshrines will remain valid as long as there is someone who believes that an old man is worth more than a new donkey, however strong the kick might be:153

"It is therefore necessary to proclaim, with even greater evidence, that any spiritual power surpasses in dignity and nobility any earthly power, as spiritual things surpass temporal ones… The spiritual power must establish and judge the earthly power, if it is not good. If the earthly power deviates, it will be judged by the spiritual; if the lesser spiritual power errs, it will be judged by the one superior to it; but if it is the supreme power that errs, it can only be judged by God, not by man. Thus says the apostle: ‘The spiritual man judges everything, and by no one is he judged’ (1Cor 2, 15)".

It’s true that the opposing side, agreeing with the general principle, claimed for kings, instead of men of religion, the supreme spiritual authority that would answer to no one except God;154 and jurists paid by Philip argued: "Before there were priests, there were kings."155 But, from the historical point of view, not to mention the biblical one (see the episode of Saul), it was just a beautiful tall tale.156 Inheriting the throne from a saint (Louis XI), Philip seemed to suppose, in the mists of a false consciousness wrapped by the legal casuistry of an extensive string of sycophants, that there was something hereditary in sanctity: and, imbuing himself to the bone with the phrase Gesta Dei per Francos (“the work of God done by French hands”),157 which initially referred only to the Crusades, he quickly inflated its meaning monstrously: whatever the French did, God signed off on; and the French, naturally, were Philip the Fair. Thus, if the Templars were engaged in dodgy financial deals, it was because they were inspired by the devil and, therefore, deserved to go to the stake; and if Philip did exactly the same thing, it was by order of the Archangel Gabriel. To get an idea of how far Philip’s pretensions went — and how much he was already imbued with the “modern” spirit —, it’s enough to recall that he was the first to propose the idea of compulsory military service extended to the entire population (an idea that, fortunately, remained on paper, until the Age of Enlightenment came to illuminate with new flashes of genius the science of state slaughter). Yes, Boniface was only wrong on one point: when he started the fight, he was too old to carry it to the end.

But everything in this world has a fringe of ambiguity. If spiritual authority is in theory superior to earthly power for the same reason that spirit is superior to brute force, to what extent was the Church of Rome, represented by its Pope, pure spiritual authority? Was it not also a temporal power, thus contaminated by brute force? To what extent is the heavy diplomatic, political, and bureaucratic organization of Rome driven by the breath of the Spirit or by the mechanical clash of the forces of this world, just like the politics of kingdoms and empires? Take note: the Catholic dogma says that the Popes are inspired by the Holy Spirit, but only in what they decree on theological and moral doctrine — not in their political and diplomatic decisions, of course; in that part which is incorporated into the wisdom of the Church as a permanent legacy, not in that which passes into History as the account of a card game. Who, then, is spiritual authority, in practical confrontation with temporal power? It is told that a poor saint, visiting the rich palace of the Renaissance Vatican, heard from the Pope the joke:

— As you see, my friend, Peter can no longer say, “I have neither gold nor silver.”

— To compensate — replied the ascetic — he also can no longer say, "Get up and walk!".

Who, then, spoke by the Spirit? The nominal head of the hierarchy or the one whom the Spirit deemed fit to inspire at the time? Who is the superior spiritual man who judges the inferior spiritual man? Do popes judge saints or do saints judge popes? The very expression “Church” assumes there an ambiguous sense: the spiritual hierarchy, as such, has at its top the saints and the martyrs; only the hierarchy of earthly ecclesiastical government descends from the pope to the cardinals, to the bishops etc. The Pope, the man who occupies the throne of Rome, can be a saint, like Peter, and will then exercise spiritual authority in full right, by the force of the Spirit who guides his acts and thoughts and preserves him from sin; but he may not be a saint at all, he may be a pretentious idiot, a coward like Benedict XI who does not hesitate to cast the stain of suspicion on the reputation of his friend and predecessor to make peace with a cold and inhuman monarch; he may be a thief, a murderer, a deceiver, an atheist. In this case, the Spirit will be present only in symbol, in the authority of the office, as well as dispersed in the world as Providence. Now, if the form of spiritual authority is double, obedience is also double: it is not the same to obey an inspired man and to obey a symbolic office, momentarily occupied by a fool or a wicked person. It is not the same to obey a vicar and a con man. Once the faithful feel this duplicity — and it is fatal that they feel it someday, as long as the Church is constituted administratively —, behold, the spiritual authority is split; and “the divided house will fall”. The true unity of the Church, therefore, has never resided in the monolithic force of the central Roman administration, but, precisely the opposite, in the spontaneous flowering of sanctity in the most unpredictable and most remote places from all contact with the Vatican bureaucracy. But this unity remains deep, latent, hidden: when it manifests itself in the light of public recognition, it is to crystallize in the form of a theocratic dominion that, imposing its yoke on worldly power, soon breaks under the pressure of aristocratic and monarchical rebellion. Heavens! Will it be the eternal human tragedy that the primacy of the spirit must conform to be only whispered in secret? That, proclaimed and assumed as truth by public consensus, it always results, by a diabolical inversion, in an even greater rise of the prestige of force? Will it always be necessary to choose between an oppressive theocracy and the oppression of worldly power?158 I don’t know, friend, and you don’t know either, and whoever says they know is a very presumptuous guesser.

What I do know is that only God is one: everything in the world is double. For it is this same internal and constitutive contradiction of the notion of “Church” that will be transmitted to its relations with the imperial and monarchical power, infecting them with the germ of a conflict that, manipulated and adorned by a thousand arrangements, will eventually explode into a rupture when the capacity to conceive new arrangements has been exhausted; when the advent of facts of a totally different order suddenly changes the frame of references.

Transcontinental trips, discovering beyond the known world a vastness of lands to conquer, suddenly changed the scene, giving the project of the Empire a new meaning. The entire immense transformation that inaugurates modern times can be summarized in a change of the European historical project: from the domestic Empire to the colonial Empire.

The new project, shining and spinning over all the real heads like a blue fly, immediately provokes three truly cataclysmic changes: 1st, the multiplication of contenders for Empire; 2nd, the profound alteration of relations between royalty and clergy, temporal power and spiritual authority; 3rd, the diversification of national cultures and the rupture of Christian unity.

1st. For many centuries, the unification of Western Christendom had been primarily obstructed by the resistance of two peoples, among the most deeply Christianized, who opposed the imperial authority. The English had been the first Christian people in Europe. More than anyone else, they had demonstrated their faith and contributed to the new Christian culture. After the initial English phase, the center of Christian culture had shifted to Paris, and the splendor of scholasticism is a primarily Parisian phenomenon. The French were so deeply connected to the Church that among Islamic warriors, “frank” became synonymous with nasrányi, Nazarene, or Christian. Thus, if the arm of the Church was in the Empire—whose domains extended over a territory roughly corresponding to Germany and part of Italy—, its heart was in England and its brain in France. Well, the English and the French would not bow to the Empire for anything in this world, and they showed through their national independences an attachment equal to or greater than the one they had for religion.

Around 1500, while the Empire was losing dominion over much of Italy, which was disintegrating into independent duchies and principalities, two other national kingdoms had formed on the Iberian Peninsula. In Portugal, Afonso Henriques had subjugated other feudal lords and created a kingdom overnight—literally, since, not having a large army, he resorted to the expedient of personally jumping through the windows of his enemies while they slept and cutting their throats in bed: when they woke up, the servants and courtiers were informed that the castle had a new lord. Thus, from window to window and neck to neck, the kingdom of Portugal was born, as the jurists of the time commented, quasi per latrocinium (I don’t understand what they meant by this quasi). In Spain, centuries of struggle against the Arab invaders had finally forged the unity of the aristocracy, resulting in the marriage of the Castilian Isabella I with the Aragonese Ferdinand II ending the last local dispute and inaugurating the new kingdom.

All these peoples had lived for a millennium under the dual obsession of Faith and Empire. They knew no other ends and values that could legitimize human action except, on one hand, the salvation of the soul, on the other, the extension of the armed power of faith. For a millennium, they had heard nothing significant that did not refer to one of these things or both. It is not surprising that every new event, whatever it may be, ended up being interpreted in terms of this old pair of concepts.

Thus, the navigations, opening to European eyes the panorama of a new world, the first thing they did was to revive old ambitions and suddenly change their emphasis: the struggle for the Empire no longer had to be a European conflict; it could become an expansion to other continents.

Now, if the European nations did not always have the conditions to defeat each other, any one of them had the means to equip a boat with a few soldiers and subdue, on the other side of the Ocean, a few naked and militarily inferior Indians. Tired of fighting against the Empire, they then decided to each make their own Empire.

2nd. But—pay attention—, the concept of Empire was not simply that of any transnational power, but rather of an armed arm of the Church. The Empire, to be a true Empire, had to carry, above its cannons, the banner of faith.

Now, how many authorized spokespersons can Faith have? How many armed arms can the body of Christendom have? The Church, at first, only recognized one: its favorite child, although often ungrateful, the Holy Roman Empire.

Of the emerging powers, one soon merges with the Empire, when Charles I, grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, is crowned Holy Roman Emperor under the title of Charles V, uniting for the next two centuries the destiny of his country with the Habsburg dynasty. In the meantime, Spain, leading the colonial conquests, had become the main European power, enriched by the gold of the Americas. The Empire, which for six centuries had been falling from frustration to frustration, finally seemed to have found its way.

But now it was not just surrounded by rebellious nations, but by competing Empires. To strengthen their claims, the Protestant Reformation had shaken the Roman monopoly of Christianity: to pose as a representative of Faith, the emerging empire no longer needed the Pope’s blessings—all it needed was to found a new Church, declare, along with political independence, spiritual independence. While the German part of the Empire is shaken by Protestant revolts, King Henry VIII, in England, taking advantage of a marital quarrel, founds a national church, Anglican-Catholic: Catholic in rites and dogma; English, because its head is not the Pope, but the King, self-proclaimed Protector and Only Supreme Head of the Church and Clergy in England with only one opposing vote, that of Sir Thomas More, who defying the Supreme Head, was beheaded on the spot.

With the head of Sir Thomas rolling on the ground, the door of time turned on its hinges, ending an era: the project to unify Europe under a Catholic Empire died with its last martyr. The foundation of the first national Church marks a radical metamorphosis in the idea of empire and signals the true beginning of modern times: taking the keys of the Kingdom from the Pope, the head of state self-appoints himself as a direct representative of God. With Henry VIII, it is Caesar who returns to the throne, invested with sacerdotal prerogatives. The millennial dualism is resolved by the absorption of the Church into the Empire.

It is doubtful that this crowned deformity, this vulgar psychopath, this murderer of women and scholars had a clear idea of how much his person and gesture represented the spirit of the new times and prefigured the unfolding of events three centuries ahead. Even historians are very restrained when dealing with this point, perhaps because of an unconscious resistance to recognize the original sin that gives birth to modern times. Henry is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the father of modern civilization, the founder of the idea of the self-sacralized State, which will later inspire Hegel and Robespierre, Napoleon and Comte, and which will continue to reverberate to this day in the discourses of the New Age and Cultural Revolution.

This idea instantly changes the whole picture of the conflict between royalty and clergy. Each king, now, will seek to dominate his national clergy, either by founding his own Church or by strengthening local religious orders that, growing disproportionately in the shadow of state support, will soon become more or less independent centers of power, capable of pressuring Rome in defense of their king’s interests… or Emperor’s. Ostensibly or informally, the clergy is nationalized.

The process is further accelerated by the rupture of the unity of the Protestant bloc: national Protestant clerics, in mutual opposition, form in the Netherlands and in Sweden. Driven by the dynamics of the struggle for independence, which soon becomes a struggle for hegemony, as well as by the dialectic of capitalist growth eager for overseas raw materials, the Netherlands soon enters the list of competitors for Empire: a Protestant, Republican and Calvinist Empire, with strong Jewish support. Its arm will extend to Brazil. In Sweden, it is Lutheranism that becomes the official cult of the State, with the king as the supreme religious authority; subsequently, Sweden, through successful occupation campaigns, rises to the position of one of the strongest imperial powers.

On the other side of Europe, Russia, which already had its national religion four hundred years earlier, but whose imperialist potential had been held back by Mongol invasions and by the immense expanses of territory to occupy, finally discovers its vocation, encouraged by the example of Western Europe, which it envies, admires, and seeks to imitate. Unified by Ivan III (“the Great”), it assumes with Ivan IV (“the Terrible”) its expansionist and Christianizing mission.159

The two processes are concomitant and, fundamentally, constitute one: multiplication of Empires, foundation of national cults: Lutheranism (Sweden), Calvinism (Netherlands), Anglicanism (England), Gallicanism (France). Each self-invested with the mission that was that of the ancient imperial project — to unify the world under the Christian banner — but reinterpreting it according to the optics of raison d’État. Each reshaping Christian discourse according to its national interest. From this new partition of Christ’s tunic, the many modern Christianities are born, which will live in reciprocal anathemas. Even the Holy Empire, now just one among others, by transferring to Spanish hands, is Hispanicized. Its Catholicism loses much of the internationalist spirit, it becomes Iberian under the forms of Jesuitism and the Inquisition’s fervor, a typical expression of a people who had become Christian on the battlefield; hardened by eight centuries of struggle against the Moors, they did not understand faith except as a war against the infidels.160

To the rulers of the 16th to 18th centuries, heirs — knowingly or not — of the spirit of Henry VIII, it seems natural and obvious that their political will is the most direct and pure expression of divine will, even when it is in open opposition with the word of the clergy and with the other competing divine wills. Where this absurd claim reveals itself most patently is, however, in Gallicanism, precisely because of its nominal submission to the Church of Rome, which forms a backdrop to the manifestations of the most petulant independence. There is even a certain candor in the conviction with which Louis XIV, invested with the authority of “Most Christian King and firstborn son of the Church,” a title he had conferred on himself, beatifies the French national interest and represses, in its name, the action of the Church he claims to represent:

“Nul n’a défendu comme lui les droits de l’État laïque et personne n’a su parler avec plus de fermeté au Souverain Pontife lui- même… Comme Roi Très-Chrétien, il pensait que servir la France, Nation Très-Chrétienne et fille ainée de l’Église, c’était servir Dieu et l’Église elle-même” 161

It is no surprise that the king thus imbued with the divine character of national interest ended up ruling, in its name and without the slightest consultation with the Pope, even theological disputes, as in the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the persecution of Protestants and Jansenists:

“Ainsi le Roi, confondant ses attibutions avec celles de l’autre Pouvoir, se fait docteur et convertisseur. Il sort de sa fonction et commet un étrange et quelquefois déplorable abus de son autorité” 162

There is, in all this, not the slightest shadow of hypocrisy. In his own way, Louis XIV was sincerely Christian, like most of the kings of his time. What is astonishing is precisely the naturalness with which each one considered their national way of being Christian far superior to the universal and supranational way, which the Church, although confused amid so many ambiguous loyalties, still represented.

3rd. But, at that time, everything is nationalized, everything starts to orbit around the king, candidate to Emperor. The emergence of a new literate caste, palatial and non-university, which I described earlier (§21), is a reflection of this change. For the struggle is now between internationalism, represented by the Pope and the remnants of the old Empire, and the imperial nationalism of the emerging powers. And, while the Pope gains control of the universities, preserving there internationalism, the kings foster national cultures, in national languages, with artists and scholars on the payroll of the nobility.

As could not be otherwise, the new intellectuals soon rush to erect into norm and ideal the fait accompli; hastily theorized ex post facto, the self-aggrandizing expedient of an insane murderer acquires an appearance of intellectual dignity in the political philosophies of Jean Bodin (Six Livres de la République, 1576), Richard Hooker (The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 1580), Thomas Smith (De republica anglorum, 1583), who, among many flourishes and countless valuable ideas, finally foist on us the notion that kings rule by divine right inherent in their illustrious persons and in the nature of things – and therefore independent of any religious sanction. Caesar, after all, was great-grandson of Venus, but no one could resort to this example because the new conception was inexpressible in the old astrological language, where spiritual authority was the Sun, and temporal power was the Moon. 163 Bodin, who was crazy about astrology, had the greatest difficulties to reconcile his ideas with the astral symbolism. What none of the theorists of divine monarchy even noticed is that the indissoluble junction, in one person, of spiritual authority and temporal power, formed the sun-moon synthesis that constitutes the prophetic authority, to which not even the popes had dared to shoulder. By the new theory, every little king who jumped out the window to slit the throats of his opponents in bed equated himself, automatically, to Moses.

As the theory had, besides this, many other weak points, its proclamation inaugurates an endless series of discussions that extend to this day: who makes the king? Who makes the law? Does the law make the king or does the king make the law? If the king makes the law that rules the king, then there is no law at all. If another one makes the law, the king does not command anything. With other names – Executive and Legislative -, the debate continues to this day, for the simple reason that it has no solution: if there is no instance higher than power – a tradition, a common impersonal belief, values sedimented in culture, and all that which finally substantiates in the term “religion” -, then the dispute between the factions of power can proceed indefinitely: whether the king wins or Parliament wins, the result, as Bertrand de Jouvenel showed,164 will always be the unlimited strengthening of power,165 and all theoretical discussions will be academic adornments of tyranny.

The proposed solutions, immediately, take two directions. Thomas Hobbes thickens the plot right away, saying that there is no other source of law than the will of the sovereign. Bodin, Hooker, and others seek to moderate the excesses of royal authority, appealing to the idea of Parliament. The English, always very practical, solve the matter with a play on words: the one who commands is the king with the Parliament, or rather, the king in Parliament.

Now, Parliament means: the political class, the important men who represent or claim to represent the population; and then inevitably, between the political class and the king, the same dispute that existed between the Church and the Empire repeats itself. The immediate consequence is that, everywhere, the rise of the king comes at the expense of the nobility: the king, invested with divine powers, does not tolerate competition even from those who, gathered in Parliament (as once the cardinals in council), gave him these divine powers.

But, for Parliament, representing the nation, to be able to crown the king-prophet, it itself must have divine attributes. And behold, the mad claim finds a venerable theoretical precedent: even before Henry VIII anointed his own head with the oil of the Mosaic inheritance, Sir John Fortescue (De laudibus legum Angliæ, 1470), generally considered the first compiler of English political theory, had already solved the problem, by maintaining that the nation, the civil and political society represented in Parliament by the nobles, is nothing less than a mystical body, exactly in the sense in which the body of the faithful forms the mystical body of Christ.166

Therefore, they appeal to the old idea of Fortescue, and behold, with one blow, the miracle is accomplished: from a temporary and more or less conventional unit, mutable and perishable at the whim of wars and inter-dynastic agreements, the nation suddenly rises to the heights of a celestial, metaphysical reality, eternal as a Platonic archetype, and invested with the terrifying prestige of sacred things. Henry, founder of the modern sacred state, is the armed arm of Fortescue’s doctrine.

Everything contributes, then, to the strengthening of power: if the king is the source of the law, as Hobbes claims, his word is final. If, on the contrary, it is the Parliament that legitimizes him, then the king is not a simple proxy, but the living individualization of a mystical body, a person anointed and sacred by which, with the endorsement of Parliament, the very mouth of God speaks…

Through the self-deified King, the world then reaches the stage of cynical maturity necessary for, finally, Machiavelli’s ideas about the reason of state could come off the paper and become widespread practice. Machiavelli, in fact, had been a precursor: his doctrine presupposed a type of national state that in Italy of that time only existed in project. His disciples will arise in the next generation, and outside of Italy, which remained incapable of forming a true national state until the nineteenth century.

Priest-king, national cult, sacredness of the political body, imperial mission of nations, reason of state: these ideas are more or less absorbed by all emerging powers, each one competing for Empire; each one, from now on, a mystical body, a new incarnation of the divine Logos, dictating its words directly to the new Abrahams, Isaacs, and Jacobs, each one neatly installed on his European throne. And, as the Bible had already warned that “the gods of the nations are demons,” and as the very demon informed that “my name is Legion,” it is no wonder that mystical bodies, each imbued with its eternal truth, multiplied quickly and went out into the world, invested with the sublime mission of imposing their sweet yoke of Good Shepherds to as many naked Indians as fell in the sight of the cannons.

Portugal was the first, giving the others a practical lesson on how to “dilate the Faith and the Empire”. Afonso de Albuquerque, with a handful of soldiers, descended the coast of India, bombing, without landing, everything he encountered along the way, until he guaranteed that, wherever he came to land, his fame had already arrived before him. Then he landed at any point and ordered the cutting of a few hundred noses, followed by the double and corresponding amount of ears, and then made known beyond any doubt, to the local government, his willingness to dialogue. And who was going to refuse dialogue, at this point? The proposal was simple and schematic: give Afonso everything they had, and he guaranteed that the remaining noses and ears would remain healthily attached to their places of origin.167

In a symmetrical inversion of the Christian expansion of the first six centuries, made at the expense of the blood of the martyrs, the imperial Christianities will inaugurate a form of sacrifice proportionate to the mentality of the new times: the martyrdom of others. It is not necessary to repeat here the rosary, well known, of European atrocities in the Americas, Africa, and India. Not all conquerors were equally cruel. From Hernán Cortez’s scorched earth policy to the treachery of the smiling English who landed in India with signs saying Trade, not territory, to then go taking all the territory and pocketing all the trade profits, there were, of course, different gradations of evil. But would this evil be so great, would the epic of “Christianization” be so steeped in blood if its starting point were not, as it was, the wrongful appropriation of the imperial dream by ambitious nations corrupted by the self-deception of a false religious consciousness?

The question touches on the most painful point and perhaps the very center of the history of the origins of modernity: when the monarchical power of all nations follows the example of the delirious murderer who usurps the crown of Christ himself, what more can be expected from the subsequent course of events? The modern state was born from a demonic farce and, faithful to its origin’s calling, grew by drinking the blood of the innocent.

Let’s recap. The idea of the Western Empire comes from Rome, from the Caesars. In a second version, Christianized, it reappears in the year 800 and lives until 1500 from crisis to crisis, unable to resolve its original contradiction between the Roman model and the Western duplicity of the clerical and aristocratic castes. Around 1500, it is reborn, multiplied, in many national versions: in a third translatio imperii, the European Empire gives way to the colonial Empires; the contradiction between clergy and nobility is resolved by the absorption, into the State, of spiritual authority, through the farce of the “national mystical body”. Three centuries of killings in the Americas, Africa, and India follow.

After three centuries, comes the Revolution, and, in a new bloodbath that surpasses in a few months all the horror of the imperial deeds overseas, the monarchies begin to fall. But the idea of the Empire does not fall with them. Resistant to all organic debilitation, as is characteristic of ghosts, it survives, saving itself through a new metamorphosis, even more surprising than the previous one. If in the first crisis it had managed to infiltrate the Church as a “Christian Empire”, if in the second it had managed to bypass the Church through the blasphemous audacity of presenting the king and future emperor as the incarnation of Christ himself, now it will play the highest card, reaching the very limits of what the most demented audacity could conceive: to dispense with all religious legitimation, even farcical, to make the Empire as such the only deity. To finally assume that Caesar is greater than Christ. This is Napoleon Bonaparte’s mission.

Indeed, Napoleon synthesizes the two currents of ideas that mark, on one side, the Old Regime, on the other, the Revolution. He synthesizes the imperial project of the Old Regime with the anti-Christian ideology of the revolutionaries, and inaugurates the first non-Christian Empire of the West. This is the true originality, the very essence of the Napoleonic project: to unlink the Empire from its commitment to Christianity, freeing it for unlimited expansion. Unlimited in two senses: outwardly, the domination of the world; inwardly, the domination over consciences, the establishment of new laws, new values, where, according to Hegel’s project, any residual Christianity could be easily absorbed and secularized in the form of “rights and duties of the citizen”. Aufheben — “absorb and overcome” — is Hegel’s term: Napoleon’s Code civil is the imperial and secular Aufhebung of Christian morality.

Napoleon was defeated less by Wellington and Blücher’s troops than by the intrinsic contradiction that vitiated the basis of his project: he indeed tried to build the secular Empire while preserving the power structure of the Old Regime — basically, a hereditary and military aristocracy. But the aristocracy, even grafted with new components taken from the troops or the Napoleonic kin, was always an aristocracy — and, having lived for twelve centuries in a sadomasochistic marriage with the clergy, it could not suddenly get used to the solitude of divorce. The Concordat with the Vatican manifests this weakness, this Achilles' heel of the Napoleonic project, which, consisting essentially in an elimination of clerical power, ended up restoring it within the very borders of the Empire, while outside, the clergy conspired with the English and German princes for the overthrow of the Empire. Moreover, a blood aristocracy is always a power of a feudal type, by that time already shaken to its roots by the rise of the new capitalist class; its survival therefore depended on social immobility incompatible with the cataclysmic changes that Bonaparte himself, as the armed arm of the Revolution, had helped to precipitate. And this weakness shows that Napoleon only dimly perceived what, on the other side of the Ocean, a new emerging power had just seen with total clarity and in a definitive way: the secular Empire could not have a residue of commitment to the Church, nor, therefore, to the old aristocracies. It needed to rely on a new social class, a new power structure, a new religious institution intrinsically linked to the State: Caesar could only resurrect in a capitalist, republican, Masonic and Protestant form. Imperial, capitalist, Masonic and Protestant republic: this is the definition of the United States.

§28 The Empire strikes back

“The Almighty has made choice of the present generation
to erect the American Empire… And thus suddenly arose
in the world a new Empire that bids fair, by the blessing
of God, to be the most glorious of any upon record”

– WILLIAM HENRY DRAYTON,
President of the Supreme Court
of South Carolina, in the year of 1776.168

The American imperial vocation did not arise with the United States: it was born earlier. A people does not expand across an entire continent, over three centuries, through dangers and superhuman efforts, to once reaching the natural or legal borders of the territory, become satisfied and settle forever within the framework of those boundaries, willing to only grow inward from then on. On the contrary: as soon as it feels master of its territory, the colonizing impulse almost naturally transforms into an imperialist impulse.

This vocation manifests itself with the force of a mature decision already in the infancy of the American nation, through a sequence of military and diplomatic feats that immediately extend the range of action of the United States over a much larger area than that previously occupied by European colonial empires. The escalation is impressive:

  1. Discreet but decisive aid to the French Revolution.

  2. Purchase of Louisiana.

  3. Attempt (failed) to invade Canada.

  4. Monroe Doctrine.

  5. Annexation of Texas.

  6. White intervention in California. War with Mexico.

  7. Establishment of a foothold in Japan.

  8. Purchase of Alaska.

  9. Annexation of the Philippines. Intervention in Cuba. War with Spain.

  10. Construction of the Panama Canal.

It is a career comparable to the major European powers of the time, and only temporarily interrupted by the Civil War. But even this was a sign: it surpassed, in extent of the battle line and in the number of deaths, all the wars in History. How was it possible that, faced with facts of this magnitude, the European powers did not immediately realize that he who God had predestined to be their gravedigger had been born? The blindness of statesmen to the most obvious courses of history is sometimes more remarkable than the flashes of prophetic vision of men of intelligence. Even after the War of '14, where only American intervention decided the course of events, these fools still believed themselves masters of the world, capable of keeping the North American eagle at a hygienic distance from adult affairs; and as soon as Wilson abandoned the League of Nations, leaving the allies free to share the German cake at their leisure, the cunning ones rubbed their hands with a Machiavellian smile, saying, “Hooray, we fooled this sucker.”

Holy delusion! In Wilson’s very entourage was he who would one day come to share with Stalin, at the Yalta banquet, the meat of the defeated and the bread of the smaller victors: an obscure legal adviser to the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Such blindness must have a reason. It’s silly to try to explain it only by a morbid Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism is not the cause of the phenomenon: it is simply its name. Besides, they weren’t so Eurocentric: they understood perfectly well what was going on in Africa or Asia, so much so that they dominated these regions with the dexterity of highly skilled players.

If they did not see, therefore, what was happening in the USA, it could only have been for one reason: because what was happening there was different from everything else. So different, so original, that the European optical apparatus did not have sensitivity for the type of stimuli that came from there. To the old mentality, the American phenomenon was invisible because it was unthinkable: they lacked the categories to think it.

In the first place, the North American nation was formed in an anti-imperial revolution and professed an anti-imperialist doctrine. If this represented a danger, it was the danger of the Revolution. It would have been necessary to be more Machiavellian than Machiavelli to suppose that, behind the republican agitation, a new Empire was being born.

In the second place, the United States was a democratic nation: national politics was the fruit of complicated parliamentary discussions that could delay a decision for years on end. From a European point of view, accustomed for three centuries to identify imperialism and absolute monarchy, it was impossible to imagine an imperial policy without an autocratic Emperor. The only Imperial Republic they knew, Holland, had failed spectacularly in its first century, and was nothing more than a vague memory. Without the unity of the Emperor’s person — so they understood — there could not be the unity of a coherent imperial policy.

In the third place, the United States did not, in fact, have a coherent and continuous imperial policy. Their initiatives abroad were intermittent, wavering at the shock of tremendous internal oppositions. Often an isolationist current came to power, which turned its back on the world.

In the fourth place, the USA was not only a democratic nation but also capitalist. Private interests, big companies, had tremendous power there, capable of influencing or combating state decisions, paralyzing them. Now, private interests, in most cases, opposed the state’s expansionist initiatives, preferring commercial penetration to military interventions.169

These data formed a confusing fog, preventing the observer from seeing, among the contradictory facts, the line of a historical dialectic that, operating above — or below — the declared intentions of men and groups, led the United States, through these contradictions themselves, to its manifest destiny170 of supreme imperial power of the world.

They did not see the emerging imperial power, in short, because it did not represent just a new imperialism, but a metamorphosis of the imperial idea — a metamorphosis that made it unrecognizable, immediately, to observers accustomed to thinking about it in its old form.

To understand this metamorphosis — the third in Western history —, it is necessary to see that it has something in common with the previous two. Indeed, on both previous occasions, the Empire was reborn by merging with ideas that were contrary to it: “Christianity,” in the first case; “nation,” in the second. These antagonistic grafts gave it new life, while at the same time, in the long run, they were the causes of its destruction.171

The constitutive contradiction of the first Christian Empire was, as we saw, that the existence of a “Church” independent of and superior to it denied, at its base, the Roman model of Empire, which it copied; thus, the Empire grows driven by conflict with the Church, and dies when its possibilities of giving this conflict a viable and productive form are exhausted. Later, the modern colonial Empires established themselves as true “national empires” — a contradiction in terms that expresses the real contradiction between the multinational scale of the project and the national interest it unilaterally serves: hence, instead of reconciling and managing the interests of various peoples in a transnational unity, as the original imperial concept demands, the modern colonial empires were nothing more than the organized enslavement of various peoples for the benefit of one. This contradiction, skillfully managed for three hundred years, would explode at the end of the 18th century, with the succession of independence wars that would come to destroy all the colonial empires, without exception, in the time span from the American Independence to the death of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar (1975).172

The new metamorphosis that inaugurates the American Empire is an immediate response to the crisis of colonial domination. It is an ostensible denial of the monarchic-absolutist version of the imperial idea. It will therefore, in the boldest of arrangements, merge this idea with those that, at the moment, seemed most antagonistic to the spirit of the old monarchies: independence, republic, democracy, free thought. For those who understood the imperial idea only as associated with absolute monarchies, these terms could contain everything, except the promise of an Empire. Behold, then, the greatest of Empires is born invisible to those who could have destroyed it in its cradle. Like Moses in his basket or Christ in the stable.

§29 Aristocracy and priesthood in the American Empire (I)

“I am not Christ, resurrecting Jairus' daughter was not within my power. On the contrary, I was a finished man at that time, set aside like in obedience to a password; I was no longer good even to be thrown to the dogs… nothing remained for me to do but to break camp and leave the country, taking with me this lifeless half of myself like Joanna the Mad with her husband’s corpse. To the west, always to the west" – Warschauer-Waremme, in The Maurizius Case,

by JAKOB WASSERMANN. 173

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other" – JOHN ADAMS

The fourth translatio imperii, bringing the center of power to the new continent (do not forget this, reader, for this is what I was talking about in §27), would realize the project in which Napoleon failed: the secular Empire, which, incorporating within itself in a secularized and despiritualized form Christian values, would take on the task of replacing the Church — all the churches — in guiding the inner life of people, and unifying under the new secular religion the Western world. The Eastern one too, if possible.

It is now important to outline the principles of the Gospel that, disincarnate and devitalized, would consolidate in the form of democratic state morality, this “lifeless half” of Christianity, initially implemented on North American territory, to be expanded worldwide in the 20th century, as a new religion of humanity.

There we will see what kind of cult the yogi-commissioner is a priest of, and what kind of sacrifice was officiated at the MASP altar.

Firstly, the religion of the New World is Masonic. All the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, without exception, belong to some Masonic lodge. From this point onwards, nobody, but absolutely nobody makes a political career in the three Americas without having to join Freemasonry, answer to Freemasonry, or confront Freemasonry. The fact is too notorious to need demonstrating. The career of Fernando Henrique Cardoso — the politician who was bad at winning votes but, receiving Masonic initiation, within a few years reaches the presidency by beating the seemingly unbeatable candidacy of Luís Inácio Lula da Silva — illustrates this again. Only that, among apostles and adversaries of this organization, there are more interested in mystifying than in clarifying its role in the spiritual history of humanity. Among the former, mystification takes the form of fantastic speculations about Masonic antiquity — abusing analogies that are taken for historical identities — and a double game in the concealment-revelation of the role played by the entity in the decisive moments of History: risky projects are hidden under the mantle of discretion, if not secrecy, but, a posteriori, everything that works out is attributed to the genius action of Freemasonry. 174

On the adversary’s side, there is evident mystification in interpreting all Masonic symbolism, including that of initiation rituals, in the sense of a base anti-Christianity suggested by the speeches of Masonic leaders from a much later period; there is deception, or bad faith, in attributing to Masonic action in the world a unity of intentions and strategy; there is deception and bad faith in explaining the entire weakening of the Christian spirit in the world as the effect of a Masonic conspiracy. 175 The first of these three errors, driven by an intent to prejudicially interpret things, mutilates and compresses symbolic language into a one-dimensionalism that could justify nothing. The second neglects the frequently chaotic, multiple, and uncontrollable course that secret undertakings assume, especially when they traverse generations and centuries and have nothing to preserve their continuity and unity except the subtle and sometimes merely symbolic force of the egregores, which a single ritual can dissipate into smoke. The third omits the fact, historically proven, that Freemasonry itself has been the target of conspiracies, divisions, and attacks by even more secretive organizations that sought to use it for various purposes, and that within these very organizations, in turn, conspiracies and secrets arose, forming an inverted pyramid where the darkest darkness haunted and governed the less dense… 176 In short, the idea of conferring on a secret society the doctrinal and administrative unity of a Church is utterly ridiculous. Historically, the secret does not act in a straight line but through the effectiveness of chaos, division, and suspicion that affects even those who serve it. Endeavors such as that of Mons. Dupanloup, for example, which try to pick out elements from Masonic leaders' words to construct a Masonic doctrine, only to then better combat it in the realm of logical arguments, are entirely futile, even though philosophically respectable; for the doctrine thus found is only one among many possibilities; it is, at best, the dominant doctrine in Masonry at a given time, ready to yield to another in the following era. 177 The great Masonic reformer of the 20th century, René Guénon, found the organization in a state of doctrinal vacuum, which a profusion of rituals and symbols, combined with suffocating rhetoric, sufficed to disguise before less demanding intellects. Guénon fills this void with the densest metaphysics. Well, against Guénonian Masonry, Mons. Dupanloup’s arguments have nothing to oppose. 178

However, behind the mirage-like variety of Masonic ideas, which do not interest us at all here, there are in the organization a few purely formal and structural traits that are constants at least since the 18th century, 179 and these, shaping the mindset of the founders of the American Empire, will leave their mark on the entire world that this empire is forging before our eyes. Before our eyes? No. Inside our brains.

First of all, the body of members of the Freemasonry, as with any other secret society, is an aristocracy. The strict selection, the initiatory rites, the discipline of secrecy and obedience to a secret hierarchy separate the initiate from the common mortals, affiliating him to an immemorial tradition and giving him the feeling, sometimes even just, of belonging to the circle of the chosen ones who, behind the blind and vain agitation of anonymous atoms, know what is going on and where things are going. Esotericism and democracy are antithetical terms like secrecy and diffusion.

But if indeed it is so, then it is completely false the assumption, accepted by most theorists for two centuries, that modernity is characterized by the democratization of political life, by the expansion of the means of people’s participation in power, by the progressive elimination of the aristocratic residue. On the contrary, both in the French Revolution and in the birth of the American Empire, what is observed is the rise of an initiatory aristocracy, whose power, strengthened by the discipline of secrecy, completely eludes all scrutiny, all criticism, all attempts at external control.

Deep down, all aristocracies had a strong esoteric and initiatory element in their origins. The blood aristocracy is nothing but the multi-secular residue of a caste that in the beginning recruited its members according to selective criteria and initiatory screenings very similar to those of Freemasonry or any other society of the genre. The chivalry orders were never simple military organizations, but initiatory societies, whose remaining rites and symbols allow us to guess the unfathomable depths of the spiritual mystery they contained.

The growth of Freemasonry in the 18th century, the French Revolution and the birth of the American Empire do not mark the extinction of aristocratic power, but a gigantic recycling of the aristocratic caste. This recycling is what properly inaugurates modern times, today’s world. It is defined by the following features:

1st – Replacement of the old blood aristocracies by the new initiatory aristocracy.

2nd – Secret or at least discreet character of the new aristocratic power.

3rd – Formidable concentration of the dominator’s power, coupled with a no less formidable expansion of the nominal rights of the dominated.

In summary: de facto aristocracy, de jure democracy – a combination that only became possible by the expansion of the role played by secrecy in political and social life.180 And it is she herself who enables the very peculiar evolution of the American nation, where the almost caricatural expansion of popular rights, protest movements and the culture of complaint does not shake in the slightest the power of the old oligarchies, but rather strengthens it.

But – beware – to emphasize the importance of Masonic presence in the constitution of the new Empire is not to paranoidly attribute to Masonic action the authorship of the course of History in the New World; it is not to make Freemasonry the invisible and omniscient demiurge that pulls the strings of everything that happens; it is not to adhere to any conspiratorial interpretation of History. For Freemasonry, in my understanding, does not direct the course of events by its deliberate action, but simply its presence in the power structure of the American Empire imbues with an element of secrecy and the spirit of a new model of priestly hierarchy the mental and political life of the peoples of the New World – an imbuing that totally escapes the control of Freemasonry itself and becomes, over time, a structural principle, which operates by itself, by the automatism of unconscious habit and regardless of the intentions of whoever it may be. What makes things go this way is a certain characteristic inherent to Masonic power, on which perhaps even the leaders and theorists of the organization have never stopped to think.

What characteristic is this? Freemasonry combines the intellectual freedom of a debate society with the rigidity and discipline of an initiatory fraternity. Initiatory fraternity means: subjection of its postulants to a sequence of preparatory rites, of its novices to initiation rites, of its members to the practice of regular rites. Rite means: imitative and bodily execution of a symbolic worldview, which, when repeated, whether understood or not, demarcates, once and for all, the entire framework of possibilities for conscious understanding of the individual.

To make myself understood in this particular, should I re-explain the entire chain of absorptions and cognitive projections that lead from simple sensory stimulation to memory, to imaginative abstraction, to eidetic abstraction, and finally to logical discourse, or should I simply refer the reader to my previous study An Aristotelian Philosophy of Culture? Of course, I should opt for the latter alternative, but as it would be foolish to suggest that the reader of this book abandon it to read another, it is better to graft here a summary of that whose extensive version he can leave to look for in the other later, right? So I say right away: what our senses gather from the endless variety of the world is first elaborated in the form of imaginative abstraction, on which and only on which — and not directly on the data of the senses — can the conceptual abstraction operate afterwards, from whose products logical reasoning will be composed later. This is one of the rare points of psychology and theory of knowledge where there is almost no disagreement, from Aristotle to Jean Piaget, from Thomas Aquinas to Benedetto Croce, from Duns Scot to Etienne Souriau and the most recent cognitive science. What happens is that not everyone draws from these verifications the obvious consequences that inescapably follow. One of them is as follows: what is outside our imaginary circle is outside our conceptual universe.181 This does not mean that it cannot be thought. It means only that, if it is thought, it will be thought of as a mere logical form, without at least close correspondence to what we understand as reality.182 Imagination is, in short, the mother of what is called sense of the real. Our sense of the real does not depend on our perceptions, our reasoning, or our will: it depends on the deeply consolidated forms of our imaginary universe. Now, each image deposited in our memory or produced in our imagination is, in the strictest sense of the word, a symbol: a seed producing multiple but analogous meanings among themselves.183

The result, for the purposes of the present investigation, is as follows: an initiatory society, whatever it may be, does not need to control the opinions of its members, since it has full control over its imaginary. In fact, the more freedom of belief there is within, the looser and less dogmatic the organization’s doctrine is, the more effective this control will be, which has all the advantages of remaining implicit. An organization that prides itself on defending an explicit dogma has no other remedy than to make it explicit — and the diffuse feelings, which govern the imaginary in the half-light of the implicit and the presupposed, lose all their magical power at the moment they are expressed in the clear language of dogmas: for from that moment they become objects of reasoning, of assent or intellectual disagreement, of criticism. This was quite evident in the cases of the Catholic Church, Islam, and much earlier, Hinduism: when the polysemic language of symbols begins to be replaced by the univocal discourse of doctrinal formulations, oppositions and heresies begin to sprout. Freemasonry has protected itself from this risk, preserving its symbolic arsenal under the protection of an impenetrable doctrinal mist; inside one can discuss everything, but the masonic doctrine, if it exists, is safe from any contestation: as long as it remains ambiguous enough to admit all interpretations, it does not run the risk of entering, even, into discussion: if all interpretations are valid, all are neutralized in advance. It is therefore understandable the extreme caution with which, among affectations of homage, the masons of the 20th century received the doctrinal contribution of René Guénon. Guénonism made masonic ideas intellectually respectable, giving them an imposing doctrinal solidity. But everything that is solid is subject to receive blows. The solution was to quickly guenonize three or four lodges and leave the rest exactly as it was. Typical masonic solution: if you agree with Guénon, you join a guenonistic lodge; if you disagree, you simply go to another lodge. Unlike large dogmatic organizations, secret societies, by the dialectic of their own survival search, feed dissent and schism: because schism, there, means automatic isolation (the members of the schismatic lodge no longer frequent the other lodges) and isolation means: impossibility of a direct confrontation. The dissident faction, isolated aseptically, can continue integrated into the set: secret societies are made up, by definition, of compartments that ignore each other. They do not imitate the organic, hierarchical and integrated model of animal bodies, but the growth of varied and independent tumors, which only have in common the fact that they are nourished by the blood of the same body.

Now, if they ask me how it is possible that generations and generations of intellectually gifted men agree to live under the rule of a numbing fog — some of the greatest geniuses of arts, sciences, and politics have been masons —, I answer that this is no stranger than the fact they agree to belong to a society whose upper echelons are occupied by characters whose identity remains secret. Whoever consents to being directed by an unknown, why would they also not accept the yoke of an incomprehensible doctrine?

The answer is, in the end, the most obvious: it is fear, it is the excessive desire for security (a larval and passive form of the desire for power) that drives men to submit to this kind of things. This fear is not entirely disproportionate. If it is true that Freemasonry originated in the guilds of the Middle Ages, it is easy to understand that in these guilds, with their arcane discipline, the common man found the protection of a force capable of intimidating nobles and clergy. From corporate loyalty to the discipline of the arcane, there is less than one step: to safeguard his own neck, a man swore to obey orders emanated from a secret source, to defend to the death the secrets of the organization, and to live among other men, forever, with a dual identity, like a spy. The hand of secret organizations has always been heavy, perhaps heavier than that of the nobility or the clergy, but at certain times their yoke must have seemed softer. This happened, for example, on the eve of the fall of the Ancien Régime in France, when the entire aristocracy thought that within Freemasonry they could find a safe refuge against the approaching storms: Louis XVI himself submitted to the rites and oaths.184

But the United States is the first country whose leaders are all or almost all masons, and where, there being no officially state-protected religion, the de facto situation is: Masonic government. And Masonic government means the following: all open conflicts, all political disputes fought in public, which constitute the very pulse of democratic life, are nothing more than the externalization of disagreements born and elaborated within Freemasonry. The democratic foam conceals and disguises the internal struggle within a new aristocracy, whose spiritual unity rests in the hands of a new priesthood. Shortly thereafter, when Brazil imitates the American example and proclaims its independence from Europe, the parliamentary life of the Empire will consist of nothing but debates between masons, whose disagreements arose on the common ground of a pact of secret loyalties. The conservatives are masons, the liberals are masons, the Emperor is a mason, the republican agitators are masons. Hovering invisibly over all fighting forces, Freemasonry emerges victorious in any case. Much more than the Emperor, it is the true “moderating power” — the spiritual authority that welcomes into its maternal bosom the disputing parties and anoints the forehead of the victor with the holy oil of legitimacy. It is therefore a gross oversimplification to attribute to Freemasonry the responsibility for revolutionary movements, because it does not commit to those it helps, just as the medieval Church did not commit to dynastic conflicts: its function is ecclesial, not royal or imperial. Like the Church, it gives birth to an aristocracy, a ruling caste, and, without directly meddling in the government of this world,185 it decisively influences the course of events, teaching, guiding, stimulating, reconciling or dividing, and ultimately — at least ideally — balancing the movement of the whole. What differentiates it from the Church is less its ideology — vague, undefined and elastic enough to accommodate all arrangements and accommodations — than its invisibility.

Whatever the intentions of its founders, the advent of Masonic government in the Americas marks a new stage in world history: the era of secrecy. Henceforth, the progressive democratization of institutions, which is the most apparent aspect of global political evolution, will run parallel to the incalculable increase in the influence of secret organizations, especially state secret organizations of the twentieth century, which will neutralize the effects of democratization to reduce it to little more than a distribution of sweets to appease angry children. Saying “a new stage” is no exaggeration: as much as one may search, one will not find in any other era or civilization things like the CIA, the KGB, widespread industrial espionage, the thousands of sects that now bind a good portion of the world’s population to confidential loyalty pacts, and many other facts that mark an unprecedented rise of the force of secret factors in the production of historical events. Historians rarely show sensitivity to the novelty of this phenomenon, which is one of the distinguishing marks of the twentieth century in relation to all previous history.186

It is evident that the advent of the Masonic government was nothing more than the trigger to set off a process of growing secrecy on a global scale, which neither Masonry nor any other organization could ever control. But it is also true that one cannot understand this process without tracing back to its origins, and that in these origins is found the participation of secret societies in the formation of American governments, as well as in the French Revolution and in the unfolding of political and ideological mutations throughout the 19th century – a chapter that will remain too obscure while focusing on these societies as mere secret political forces, without taking into account the specific character of their action, often of a supra-political and properly sacerdotal order. And finally, it is clear that phenomena such as the current organized banditry cannot be remotely understood without referring it to the general framework of what I called increasing secrecy.187

But, if all this is clear, then the contempt of historians and social scientists for this phenomenon is unjustified. It is unjustified, but it is explained: the role of the secret in political life has expanded in such a way that it surpasses the imaginative possibilities of the common man and penetrates into that zone of improbability that borders on fiction and pure and simple impossibility: its own disproportionate growth makes it invisible, and invisibility is the ferment that makes it grow even more.188 On the other hand, the widespread conviction, instilled by democratic ideology, that the history of the world evolves towards the increasing circulation of information, is not conducive to any valuation of secret factors – and intellectuals are not immune to this belief.

In general, the modern intelligentsia shows a complete inability to deal with these issues, either mystifying them, whimsically enhancing the power of secret societies to the point of making them the invisible demiurge of History, or affecting a blasé superiority that, from the height of its almost divine knowledge of supposedly impersonal and objective historical laws, does not stoop to examine “esoteric” trivialities that, in their view, could in no way affect the course of things. As if in a pact designed to block access to a real understanding of the subject from two sides, historians and social scientists tend towards Olympian indifference, literati towards mysticoid dazzlement. An example of this latter attitude is Shelley, who, influenced from adolescence by a follower of the Bavarian Illuminati, and later impressed by the anti-Masonic reports of Abbot Barruel, ended up becoming the most intellectualized spokesperson of the conspiratorial conception of History.189 Whether under the strong impression of poorly digested readings or the impact of traumatic personal experiences, many modern writers publicized the existence and activity of secret forces, but gave them symbolic, veiled and subjectivist interpretations, capable of morbidly exciting popular imagination without clarifying anything about the nature of the phenomenon. All writers, poets, scientists who had closer contacts with mysterious gurus and secret societies came out traumatized and astonished, unable to intellectually elaborate their experiences but always willing to give them some kind of mystifying expression. Many of the monsters and vampires that populate Western literature over the past two centuries – starting with the most famous of all, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – are veiled personifications of secret societies, just as many themes of poetry and fiction constitute almost literal translations of rites and symbols of esoteric and pseudo-esoteric organizations.

I mentioned earlier the tyrannical domination that Georges Gurdjieff exercised over the minds of his disciples, among whom were not a few celebrities of letters and sciences, reduced to the condition of astonished children in the hands of the powerful mystifier.190 They were consumed by the sphinx, incapable of deciphering it. Gurdjieff’s contemporary, Aleister Crowley, sowed despair and terror among young Portuguese intellectuals who came under his influence at the beginning of the century – Almada Negreiros, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Fernando Pessoa. The general rule in these cases is the absolute helplessness of the modern “intellectual” before the “nocturnal hand” that guides him.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was a reader of Madame Blavatski and frequented “occultist” circles. His wife, who was a medium, told him that she had received a mysterious coded message from spirits, which exposed, in the symbolic form of a lunar-solar cycle of 28 days, the set of all possible forms of human personality. Yeats, impressed, composed with these images A Vision (1926): the impact was great, because the work seemed to critics, ignorant of all authentic mysticism, to bring esoteric knowledge of unfathomable depth, which, devoid of recognizable historical sources, could only have been inspired from beyond. Even a writer of notorious Marxist sympathies, like Edmund Wilson, was gobsmacked.191

Yeats himself did not understand anything about the “message”. Dazed, he turned over all of Western philosophical literature in search of an explanation. It was in vain, but after three years, the “spirits” put an end to his torment… ordering him, in a new message, to stop studying the subject.

Until the end of his life, Yeats did not know if his Vision was truth or illusion. He was tormented by insoluble doubts, felt half wise, half impostor. The episode would have turned out better if the poet, instead of blindly entrusting himself to “spiritual teachings” of more than doubtful origin, had gone to study the classics of Eastern mysticism. The complete explanation of the “cycle of personality” could be found, for example, in the works of Mohyieddin Ibn-Arabi. The “cycle of personality” is nothing more than a particular application of the procession of Divine Names – divided, in astrological symbolism, by the 28 lunar houses – which gives rise to cosmic manifestation and repeats, analogously, in the microcosm of the human soul.192 If Yeats' gurus wanted to teach him this, why didn’t they simply give him a translation of Ibn Arabi or one of the many other Islamic mystics who deal with the subject to read? Why did they have to transmit the teaching to a medium in trance, certainly more hypnotic than spiritual, omitting the sources and surrounding the teaching with a mysterious aura that could only serve to confuse her and her husband? The answer is simple: they did this for the same reason that Madame Blavatski, when reproducing excerpts from a Tibetan classic she had read in German translation, preferred to say she had found them in the only copy, kept under seven locks in an underground monastery in the East.193 They did this because the power of the psychic dominator resides in mystery and, where there is no mystery, one must be fabricated. The case reveals the sad condition of the European intellectual, at the mercy of “psychic influences” that he cannot understand or master, to which he erroneously attributes a “heavenly” origin and to which he pays a superstitious cult, made of fear and suspicion, and without true faith, ending up feeling like a mix of a sucker and a con man.

The stories of artists and intellectuals psychically manipulated and made clowns of by pseudo-spiritual masters in the 20th century form a tremendous indictment against the presumption of modern intellectualism, the proud mouthpiece of an era that considers itself the zenith of human self-consciousness.

One of the most depressing chapters of this tragicomic epic was the fate of another great English poet, Robert Graves, at the hands of the “cosmic jester” Omar Ali Shah.194 The case is detailed in Graves' biography by Martin Seymour-Smith.195 Psychically dominated by Shah, who was his guru, Graves was induced to collaborate – as a useful innocent, of course – in what is considered the greatest literary fraud of the century: a new translation of Omar Khayyam’s Rubayyat, ostensibly based on an unpublished manuscript that had been under the guard of the Shah family in Afghanistan for centuries. Research conducted by two philologists, John Bowen and L. P. Elwell-Sutton, showed that the ancient manuscript did not exist and that the translation – which Shah had given to Graves to put into verse – was simply a plagiarism of a 19th-century American adaptation. Graves, warned that he was being used for a fraud, played the offended maiden and died without admitting he was wrong.

An author named Ernest Scott, spokesman – perhaps pseudonym – for Omar Ali Shah’s organization, even expressly states that this and other “esoteric” entities like to “take possession of the minds” of intellectuals and involve them in persecutory situations that will lead to despair.196 He specifically cites the case of John Fowles, whose frankly paranoid plots, The Collector and The Magus197 were inspired by this type of experience. Fowles did not deny it. I suppose similar things could be said of Stephen King and Colin Wilson, probably also of Doris Lessing.

The most depressing side of these stories is that the deceived intellectuals feel more or less like raped women. Humiliated at their point of greatest pride – intelligence – they rarely or never admit that they have been made fools. They prefer to allude to the subject indirectly and symbolically, thereby helping to give their tormentors' feats a magical prestige aura. No one denies that the experience of putting oneself under the domination of a malignant mind can give a writer’s literary fantasies a mysterious appeal and contribute to their success. But this success is achieved through a diminution of consciousness, a voluntary self-deception, which becomes even more immoral as it will infect innocent readers and viewers.

It is precisely through intellectuals and writers that esoteric and pseudo-esoteric organizations exert their influence over society as a whole – an influence that affects the deep strata of collective psychology rather than the surface of political history. It is curious that the same intellectuals who spread fanciful visions, attributing to secret societies a non-existent demiurgic power, do not realize that the only effective power they exert is precisely that which they serve as an instrument: the power to shape the social imaginary.

In virtually all cases, the traumas of inner experiences induced by malevolent spiritual guides end up becoming mystifying literature, which, alluding to events in a veiled manner and covering them with an attractive and self-flattering symbolic aura, only serves to leave the public in that state of fearful doubt that soon turns into attraction and vulnerability. With the probably unique exception of August Strindberg, who courageously denounced the theosophical mystification198 that had almost driven him to madness, intellectuals terrified by pseudogurus end up becoming discreet apologists for those who torment them. It has been very rare that, over the past two centuries, an intellectual who had had contacts with secret societies would elaborate on this experience in an intellectually dignified way and write about them in a way to enlighten the public.

Given so many cases that show the stunned passivity, the inertia of contemporary intellectuals before the manufacturers of secrets, the affectation of indifference by those who only know the subject from afar can only seem like adolescent boastfulness, strutting to exorcise an invincible fear. But if literati serve secret organizations out of a masochistic delight in voluntary slavery, the affectation of superior indifference on the part of philosophers, historians, and social scientists often is simply a conscious complicity in maintaining a secret with which they have committed themselves by oath. Whenever an academic scholar turns up their nose at esoteric subjects in the name of a supposed scientific rigor, the most basic precaution recommends ensuring that they are not a covert esotericist, occultist, mason, or rosicrucian. For true scientific rigor does not consider itself superior to any subject, and it certainly does not consist of poses. When the pose becomes too emphatic, there is a histrionic element in it, probably conscious pretense.199

However, it is true, on the other hand, that a potent disincentive to studying these issues comes from the fact that they were abundantly emphasized in a unilateral way by authors ideologically committed to certain extremist wings, such as Léon de Poncins, on the right, or Ivan Maïski, on the left – each one denouncing the secret societies of others – and they became involved in a repellent rhetorical chatter.

But isn’t it time for at least some scholars to proclaim their independence from ideological commitments (or even secret loyalties) and start seriously investigating what perhaps none of the powers in this world would like to see investigated?200 If so many can mobilize the best of their intellectual energy to conceal certain realities, why couldn’t even a few dedicate themselves to the effort of revealing them? Paul Johnson has shown that, as a general rule, the intellectuals who shape the modern world are quite unreliable characters, almost always more committed to the pursuit of power and self-aggrandizement than to any search for truth.201 But is it possible that the entire intellectual caste is committed to falsehood and self-deception, that it constitutes, in its entirety, a priesthood of the false? It is too early to answer. Perhaps the answer will only come within many generations. But for now, the theme of secret societies can serve as a touchstone, dividing intellectuals between those willing to seek the truth about the matter and those who prefer to mystify it or flee from it.

§30 Aristocracy and priesthood in the American Empire (II)

“Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but lie” (Rev 3, 9).

Secondly, the United States is a Protestant Republic. However, unlike what happened in Sweden and the Netherlands, where one current – Lutheran in the former, Calvinist in the latter – quickly takes the lead to religiously unify the country, American Protestantism, under the impact of democratic pluralism, fragments into a multitude of sects that cannot be reduced to the unity of a religious hierarchy that imitates that of the Catholic Church. And, with no religious unity, the different sects have to learn to coexist and compete on an equal footing in the same territory under the protection of the same civil authority that remains indifferent to religious disputes and equidistant from all confessions. Protestant Republic will ultimately mean: a secular state, a state without an official religion. The United States is the first professedly a-religious state – in the etymological sense: agnostic – known in the history of the world.

The revolution this represents in the mental structure of humanity is so profound, so vast in its consequences, that next to it the following revolutions – of France, Russia, or China, to mention only the largest – with all their dazzling procession of massacres, ideological radicalisms, new cultural fashions, extravagant economic-administrative experiments, are nothing more than peripheral additions and footnotes. All these revolutions have passed, the states they founded have collapsed with a bang or melted melancholically, and the part of their cultural legacy that did not dissipate in smoke ended up incorporating, without great shocks, into the dominant current: the American Revolution.

So, what is the legacy of this Revolution to the world? Democracy? It can’t be, since it coexists perfectly well with dictatorships when it suits it, and given that the survival of a Masonic aristocracy closely associated with an economic oligarchy is one of the very pillars of the American system. Liberal capitalism? Also not, because the American system itself, through the expansion of state welfare, ended up assimilating various characteristics of social democracy. Republicanism? No, because the democratic and egalitarian elements of the American ideology that spread around the world were able, without traumas, to be incorporated by old monarchies turned constitutional, such as England, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain.202 Of the various components of the American revolutionary ideology, the only one that was fully, literally, and unalteredly assimilated by all the countries of the world was the principle of the secular state. If it is true that “by their fruits ye shall know them” or that things are essentially what they eventually become, the American Revolution is only democratic, republican, and liberal-capitalist in a secondary and more or less accidental way: in essence, it is the liquidation of the political power of religions, the global implementation of the state without an official religion.203

What does this mean?

It means, first of all, that any religious law ceases to have any public validity or obligation, that the fulfillment or not of a religious commandment becomes a matter of the private sphere, that in principle it cannot interfere in public affairs at all.

It means, secondly, that the ethical criteria that will preside over social life, having to be extra-religious, end up being supra-religious, since the State, by placing itself above religions, becomes the arbiter of their disputes, and judges without being judged, without having to answer except to God, incarnated in the “popular will”: vox populi, vox Dei.

It means, thirdly and consequently, the extinction of religion as an organizing principle of human conduct, since obedience to religious principles is only possible to the extent that the State allows it and it does not conflict with civil laws.

But these three consequences, added together, represent, strictly and in the long term, the total deauthorization of religious law, the extinction of religion as such, the creation of a new type of spiritual phenomenon that, circumscribed to private life, soon merges indistinguishably with psychotherapy, relaxation techniques, meeting clubs, and all the other substitutes for “inner life” that the new society can create for the private satisfaction of its members. The victory of “Civil Theology” could not come without bringing along a “civil spirituality”.

One who perceived these consequences very clearly, indeed ardently desiring them, was Bruno Bauer, a theorist who hated Judaism as he hated all religions. In the secular state as he desired it,

"all religious privilege in general should be suppressed, and if some or many or even the majority believe they are inclined to perform certain religious duties, this performance should be left up to them as a purely private matter".

But this would represent, in effect, the end of religion, especially since

_ "to declare that the law of the Sabbath no longer has a mandatory character for the Jew will be the same as proclaiming the dissolution of Judaism_"204.

Bauer also did not escape the consequences that this change would have for the Jews themselves: giving up seeking the emancipation of Judaism, and only seeking their emancipation as citizens, the Jew

"_cannot remain Jewish in public life except sophistically and in appearance; therefore, if he wants to remain Jewish, appearance will become the essential and triumph.

The Jew, in order not to let his religious law prevent him from fulfilling his duties to the State – if for example he goes to the House of Representatives on a Saturday and takes part in the deliberations – must have ceased to be a Jew. Where there is no more privileged religion, there is no religion"205.

Is it surprising that, under these conditions, the movement to establish a secular Jewish state soon lost all connection with religious traditions and even began to be led by people of Jewish origin opposed to Judaism? Or that this movement, in expanding, ended up strengthening among Jews in the entire West a spirit of worldliness and “modernism” that had been gradually contaminating them since the Revolution, and that, dissolving the bonds of millennial solidarity that had defended the Jewish community against all sorts of persecutions, left the Jewish people defenseless and naive against the advance of the Nazi threat, only to have to rescue them hastily ex post facto with the help of American money? Is it surprising that the organization of aid to the victims of Nazism enormously reinforced the secular Jewish movement, culminating in the formation of a state where the religious community does not exceed three percent of the population today and is subjected to all kinds of constraints and humiliations at the hands of modernizers and atheists? Or that, in this way, the Jewish religion had to pay the bill for the excesses committed by its adversaries?206 That, losing the religious principle of its cultural unity, the Jewish people – not coerced by any racial homogeneity207 – were reduced, at the very moment of their supreme material glory, to the merely external and accidental unity of an amalgam of multinational interests, thus fulfilling Bauer’s prophecy that Jewish identity, in the new framework, would be nothing more than a triumph of appearances over reality208 – no, it is not surprising.

The consequences for other world religions were no less serious.

Firstly, the State, being secular, is in a position to arbitrate religious disputes according to criteria that, not being those of any of the religions in dispute, must be above all of them. In practice, this is equivalent to proclaiming a civil morality that is above all religious morality and is, ultimately, the only one obligatory for all citizens. Knowing that the principles of his particular religion are only valid for his immediate group and that integration into the larger society depends exclusively on obedience to civil morality, the citizen is permanently invited to abandon the burden of double morality and to simplify things for himself, sending religious morality to hell and sticking to civil morality. This represents, straight away, the rupture of the temporal continuity of the religious community: the State guarantees the rights of the son who rejects the religion of the father, but not those of the father who intends to pass his religion on to the son. Religion, in the end, has no authority, not even over minors.

Secondly, the State, having become the arbiter of religious disputes, clings to the convenient privilege of being able to judge them without taking into account, in the slightest, the contents of the involved religious beliefs, and treating the religions in dispute as if they were just clubs or parties, all with equal rights regardless of the value or lack of value intrinsic to their respective ideologies or programs. The inevitable consequence is a leveling down: in the eyes of the law, of civil morality, of the establishment, the great religions like Judaism and Christianity, which founded our civilization and created the very ethical values from which democratic ideology receives its prestige, are no better or worse than the cult of goblins or the Church of Satan209, which, like them, have their rights ensured by the Constitution, and with which they must compete in the market as one product among others.

It is more than evident that, in this dispute, the State, having to always judge according to neutral criteria, i.e., those that deviate as much as possible from religious presuppositions, always has to favor systematically the currents whose ideologies are less dependent on these presuppositions, i.e., agnostic ideologies. Between the faction that intends to have a morality valid for all human beings and the one that asserts the fullest moral relativism, the latter necessarily has the advantage; and this is because the State defends the rights of those who do not wish to submit to a certain religious morality, but not those of the religion that intends to impose its precepts on those who, within their group, do not yet have the conditions to form their own opinion. The young, the weak-minded, or simply those who have some family conflict, are instantly invited to abandon their reference group, taking shelter under the protection of the secular State. The absolute dominance of civil morality represents the systematic boycott of all transmission of religious morality to new generations. The formidable expansion of atheism in the world, as well as the phenomenon of pseudo-religions that divert any remaining religious impulses in humanity to harmless or even harmful targets, would never have been possible without this achievement of the American Revolution.

Of course, if this happened in the world, it was not without reason. The main one, I believe, is that religions themselves have never seriously sought to find a principle of peaceful coexistence, but rather to wage bloody combat against each other, the creation of a multi-religious State could only be achieved through civil morality, which, under the pretext of pacifying them, neutralizes and emasculates them.

But, on the other hand, would it be correct to say that the American state is secular, is agnostic, is indifferent to religion? Did we not just see that it is a Masonic State? That Masonry, forming the consciences of its members through rites and symbols, rigorously exercises the function of spiritual direction? That the Masonic aristocracy is topped by a priestly caste that arbitrates political struggles without directly intervening in them?

The secular state does have a religion. It’s just that it’s an esotericism which does not correspond, on the lower levels of society, to any particular exotericism, because, in the new framework, the function of exotericism, or popular religion, is performed by the entire population of religions and sects in dispute. Judaism and Christianity, Islam and Buddhism have become mere “popular sects” there, alongside spiritism and theosophy, the New Age and ufology, all leveled and integrated into the grand liturgy of civil religion, some reluctantly, others willingly, others still without having the slightest idea of whom they serve. Above all of them hovers, invisible and omnipotent, the Religion of the Empire, perpetuated in the discreet cult officiated by a new priestly caste gathered from the higher ranks of the Masonic aristocracy210.

§31 From Wilhelm Meister to Raskolnikov

“Prometeu já não arrebata o relâmpago.
Ícaro não aspira a um céu invinto.
Anteu não quer a terra nem o Olimpo.
Há um pretenso heroísmo cujo pântano
é este mundo, aleatório como o instinto”

– BRUNO TOLENTINO

(“Prometheus no longer seizes the lightning. Icarus does not aspire to an invincible sky. Antaeus does not want the earth nor Olympus. There is a pretended heroism whose swamp is this world, as random as instinct.”

– BRUNO TOLENTINO)

One of the main functions of religion is to provide man with a symbolic image of the world, in which he can read in filigree the map of the meaning of life. This image is transmitted either through mythic and initiatory narratives,211 or through the rite that executively repeats the main steps of the mythic plot. By it, man finds his way in the labyrinth of life, rediscovering at every step, in the ungraspable variety of lived situations, experiences that repeat in the microcosm of his personal existence the actions protagonized by the gods and heroes of the mythic narrative. This is why attempts to “interpret” myths repeatedly fail: myths are, on the contrary, instruments for interpreting life, and the believer or the novice who reads life through them — entering into them and taking them as a message coming from his own deepest interior — understands them more than the philologist who reads them through some other perceptual grid. For this approach reduces them to objects, in the vain effort to encompass them in the conceptual framework of a certain science, which, precisely for being such, could never rise to a level of universality higher than theirs: metaphysica per se est et per se concepitur.

But the myth as an interpretation of life does not and could not have a constant meaning; and the successive versions it receives — whether in the form of theoretical thought or initiatory narrative — reveal the mutations of the meaning of life as they appear to different epochs and mentalities. These mutations manifest not only through the different emphases that different times give to the possibilities of meaning of a given myth, but also through the diverse preference given to this or that myth, to this or that theme, to this or that topos of the mythic narrative in the course of historical evolution.

That is why we can mark, in the West, the precise moment when the Christian myth gives way, as an index of the meaning of life, to the Masonic myth. From the moment when, in narrative arts, Masonic themes and topoi begin to predominate over Christian ones,212 the seeds of a new era, post-Christian or anti-Christian, are sown in the world.

Now, this phenomenon manifests itself most clearly between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th. Until then, European narrative literature was characterized by the predominance of themes that referred to a type of conflict modeled on schemes of the Bible or Christianized Greco-Latin mythology. The basic issue around which characters and plots revolved was the salvation of the soul: the meaning of the characters' existence was never entirely resolved in the denouement of the plot, but left open the prospect of a second denouement, extraterrestrial, to take place at the Last Judgment, which would give the true meaning of the first. In other words, all destinies were viewed sub specie æternitatis, terrestrial plots never had in themselves the key to their own meaning, but implied as their backdrop a cosmic story written by Providence with a view to an extramundane meaning. This is so clear in the plots of Shakespeare, Racine, Corneille, Calderón, Lope de Vega, Quevedo — not to mention Dante and all medieval literature — that it is not necessary to go into longer demonstrations. But the most striking example, perhaps unexpectedly, is that of Cervantes; for in Don Quixote the assumption of a metaphysical destiny of the character gives the denouement a meaning precisely opposite to what it would have for readers lacking this assumption: the life of the hidalgo only has an edifying meaning for us because we know that, in the eyes of God, he is the sane one, and insane those who consider him mad; that the anti-hero of ill-fated exploits is an authentic hero of the spirit; and that life seemingly ended in defeat is in fact the victorious testimony of the supremacy of the meaning of life over life itself. To those who do not believe in a meaning that transcends life, these words from the narrative commentary of Miguel de Unamuno are pure nonsense:

“If our lord Don Quixote were to rise again and return to his Spain, they would be looking for a second intention in his noble ravings. If one denounces an abuse, pursues injustice, whips the mediocrity, the slaves ask: What is he looking for in this? What does he aspire to? Sometimes they believe and say that he does it to have his mouth shut with gold; others that it is due to mean feelings and low passions of vengeance or envy; others that he does it for amusement and to pass the time, for sport…

Look and observe. Faced with any act of generosity, heroism, madness, to all these stupid bachelors and priests and barbers of today they can only think of asking: Why does he do it? And as soon as they believe they have discovered the reason for the act — whether it is the one they suppose or not — they say: Bah!, he has done it for this or that. As soon as a thing has a reason to be and they know it, the thing has lost all its value. That’s what logic is for them, the filthy logic”.213

Well: between the 18th and 19th centuries it happens that the meaning of the plots begins to close in a purely earthly resolution: the meaning of existences is no longer in the Last Judgment, in the sense they may have in the eyes of God, but only in personal self-realization, in the social, vocational, professional success or failure of the character. And, in a curious inversion, it is no longer human life that has to justify itself before a supra-terrestrial instance, but, on the contrary, the supra-terrestrial powers are the ones that do not enter the plot except as co-authors of worldly success and failure.

This does not mean that in earlier literature the struggle for worldly success was an absent or unimportant theme. Rather, it was the case that failure or success, distantly reflecting the movements of Providence, were merely a temporary sign of the character’s celestial destiny, an announcement of the salvation of their soul. It also does not mean that Providence is absent in the new literature. Rather, the ultimate meaning of events no longer depends on a metaphysical significance, and Providence, reduced to a kind of hidden administration of History, emerges as one of the determinants of a destiny whose meaning is entirely resolved in the realm of personal self-realization.

The most significant work of the period, in this sense, is Goethe’s Years of Learning of Wilhelm Meister. Its theme is the discovery of personal path amid the multiple misunderstandings of life. The revelation of the deep causal forces that direct individual existence towards self-realization is, in the same act, the revelation of the hidden engines of History: the manifestation of a secret power that, in a benevolent way, leads human beings to a productive existence, according to each one’s vocation. It is commonplace to say that Meister has a hidden meaning, that it is an initiatory narrative. When we seek in it the initiatory element, we find that the vicissitudes of Wilhelm’s life, which at first glance seem a meaningless and random succession, are governed, from afar, by the “Unknown Superiors”.214 The success of the earthly venture, man’s self-realization in the world, under the veiled and amiable protection of cosmic powers incorporated into the collective being of secret organizations, becomes the supreme meaning of existence: Wilhelm Meister reveals to us that History is directed by hidden forces, sometimes ambiguous in their apparent mode of action, but essentially good.

The theme is common to many Masonic works of the time. The seemingly chaotic adventures of Tamino and Pamina in Mozart’s The Magic Flute turn out in the end to be the achievement of a plan conceived by the high priest Sarastro to lead the bride and groom to the Masonic initiation that will give them power and happiness.215

In Balzac’s Human Comedy, a vast panorama of French social life, mentions of secret societies that invisibly direct events behind the apparent chaos of intermingling individual destinies are frequent.216

In Goethe’s novel, as Wilhelm overcomes youthful rebellion to integrate into the real world as an educated and helpful citizen, society reveals itself as a microcosm mirroring a universe directed by benevolent powers. The extraordinary beauty of this image of the universal order should not make us forget that it deals only with what is called an initiation into the “Lesser Mysteries”, that is, the revelation of the historical-cosmic order; and that as soon as the Lesser Mysteries pose themselves as an end in themselves, they become a hindrance to man’s spiritual development, barring him from access to the “Greater Mysteries” where the cosmic order is transcended by knowledge of the infinite and the divine. Now, Masonry, like all other spiritual paths originating from craft initiations, is essentially an initiation into the Lesser Mysteries, and only retains its meaning when integrated into the body of a larger spiritual tradition, capable of absorbing the knowledge of cosmic mysteries as a transitional stage on the path to the knowledge of God. And what most emphatically characterizes the period mentioned here is precisely the rupture between the Lesser and the Greater Mysteries, the attempt to make the historical-cosmic initiation the terminal stage of life’s meaning, to bar man from access to the infinite and confine him to the earthly dimension.217

The trajectory of Meister mirrors that of Goethe himself — a high dignitary of Masonry —, from the romantic rebellion of a poète maudit youth to the splendid maturity that finds in the service to the State, society, progress, the realization of the meaning of earthly existence, just like the first Faust that concludes with the praise of industry and technique that will open to man the doors of a new civilization. But, in old age, Goethe acutely becomes aware of the limitations of the historical-cosmic perspective. In the continuation of Wilhelm Meister and especially in the second volume of Faust, he tries to integrate this perspective into the larger framework of a purely spiritual ascent. Christian themes then resurface, and repentance appears as the path that opens the doors to salvation; the redeemed soul, which was Promethean and domineering before the world, becomes, inversely and complementarily, passive and “feminine” before God, and, transcending the historical-cosmic sphere, ascends to the heavens. The final entry into the kingdom of the Greater Mysteries crowns the inner journey of the greatest of modern poets with the discovery of a Law superior to the cosmic order, as well as a humility deeper and more saving than that of the mere servant of History.

It is highly significant that Goethe, having experienced the Masonic break from the Christian tradition and becoming the quintessential spokesperson for the historical-progressive ideology, felt, in a more or less obscure way throughout his mature life, the spiritual insufficiency of the Lesser Mysteries and persistently sought a higher spiritual perspective. Divided between the spiritual impulse and the Masonic rejection of Christianity, he saw no other way but to seek higher spirituality in a neighboring religious tradition: Islam. Themes of Islamic spirituality, learned through devoted reading of great Persian and Arab mystical poets and thinkers, are a constant presence in Goethe’s lyrics. In private conversations, Goethe expressed his appreciation for Prophet Mohammed several times, even considering making him the subject of a play, unfortunately left unfinished. The consideration of a possible “Islamic way out” for the conflict foreshadows, with a century and a half in advance and on a personal scale, the formulation of the Western drama that would be given by René Guénon. According to Guénon, if Western civilization could not reunify Freemasonry and Christianity – Lesser and Greater Mysteries – restoring the fragmented body of traditional spirituality, it would have no alternative but to fall into barbarism or Islamize. 218 As both of these tendencies have continued to strengthen in the decades since Guénon’s diagnosis – with the marks of ascending barbarism as pronounced as the Islamic expansion in European countries and even in the United States – it is uncertain what is more remarkable: the accuracy of the prophecy of the great French ascetic or its anticipation in the soul of the German poet.

The image of the Perfect Man, or Universal Man, in all traditions, is not only that of the perfectly realized human individuality but also that of the point of intersection between Heaven and Earth; that is, the perfect balance between creative activity and contemplative passivity. In the Chinese triad, Jen, the Man, is active and dominant in relation to earthly existence, passive and obedient to the injunctions of the Spirit. The rupture between the Lesser and the Greater Mysteries, leading to the unilateral predominance of the Promethean ideology disconnected from all contact with the Spirit, represents a splitting in half of the Universal Man, the most painful and tragic spiritual experience ever lived by humans on Earth.

As we saw in the paragraphs above (§§19 to 22), the rupture with Tien, the Holy Spirit, can only result in man’s fall under the dominion of Ti, the Earth, that is, the set of determinations of space, time, and quantity that constitute the physical cosmos, where the eternal struggle of Leviathan and Behemoth unfolds. There, the quest for creative freedom – the human action in time, self-realization of History – inevitably clashes with the limitations of the physical nature (e.g., in the conflict between technological progress and ecological crisis), just as the impulse to transcend spatial barriers (e.g., through the worldwide network of telecommunications) collides with the blind mechanism of historical entropy, which constantly robs man of the beneficial enjoyment of the best achievements of material technology and turns progress into an acceleration of despair. Action declines into sterile agitation, contemplation into slavish passivity.

The Promethean ideology that, in the wake of the French Revolution discourse, rashly offered all men the immediate enjoyment of earthly happiness as soon as society got rid of the shackles of religion, soon takes the form of a flattering appeal to the youth to break away from all forms of traditional obedience and to strive for the audacious conquest of the world’s goods. In the new society, the destructive impetus that had made the Revolution was to be channeled towards the pursuit of success. Hence comes the powerful mythical image that still sensitizes the contemporary soul: the myth of celestial guidance towards success, which finds expression in the first volume of Wilhelm Meister. Throughout the 19th century, it would evolve through the fusion of occultism and the American ideology of self-realization, until it became, in our time, the general belief of the Western masses: today there is no one in the big cities who does not live according to the expectation, stated or assumed, conscious or unconscious, that a concert of invisible powers directs each individual towards self-realization in work, love, and social life in general, with failures being explained as misalignments with the cosmic order. The grafting of Eastern symbolisms onto this ideology of substantially Masonic and revolutionary origin allows for failures to be explained as a result of karma; but its decisive contribution was to introduce into the morality of modern man a new sense of sin: to the extent that the function of Providence is no longer to lead men to eternal life, but to satisfy their appetites in this world, sin no longer lies in an offense to human dignity, or disobedience to an explicit divine commandment, but in “imbalance.” “Imbalance” means any act, thought, or habit that may put the individual in disharmony with a cosmic order supposedly committed to ensuring the success, health, and wealth of all good citizens. It is “imbalance,” for example, to commit acts of violence, but it is also “imbalance” not to brush one’s teeth, to eat fatty foods, or to smoke, at least “excessively,” whatever that may be. And, as the cosmic order is no longer just the passage to the spiritual sphere, but is itself the terminal horizon of existence, sin is not punished with a spiritual penalty after Judgment Day, but right here and in the form of worldly failure, illness, or poverty. Getting a cold, having debts, or suffering a car accident are things that, in this framework, represent symptoms — and at the same time the cure — of some imbalance with the cosmic order, and therefore lead people going through these situations to feel embarrassment and shame, as those who committed adultery or stole did in other times. That these apparently conformist convictions can coexist, in the same soul, with progressive feelings imbued with Promethean revolt against the state of things in society, is something that is precisely explained by the common origin of these two attitudes in the ideological amalgam that this book has been describing: wherever, in the absence of a connection with the spirit, a revolutionary Prometheanism arises, there will also arise a feeling of passive conformism before the physical order; and, wherever, under the same conditions, there is an attempt to despotically dominate the physical order, there will arise, in contrast, an obedience-based conformism before the authority of the masters of this world.219 They are incompatible and inseparable.220 In theory, they are dialectically complementary, but there is no possible synthesis except through the Aufhebung that absorbs the conflicting terms, elevating itself to the plane of pure spirituality — which is precisely what modern ideology rejects with all its might. But this welding of the incompatible, like all contradiction without synthesis, throws the soul into that state of sterile agitation that the Greeks called ubris (hübris): the clash of energies that, spinning in a closed circuit, can only be channeled in the direction of increasing enervation: the more vain and unprofitable a state of mind, the greater its power of hypnotic contagion. The reader will have no difficulty recognizing here, again, the basic components of the yogi-commissioner, as well as the secret of his magical attraction.

The appeal of Promethean ambition, calling ambitious youths to the utmost individualism in the struggle for life, constituted one of the keys to the formation of the new Masonic aristocracy: meritocracy, as it would later be called, gathered the best, the most apt, to protect them and guide them from afar on the path of victory. The constellation of winners would form the new ruling and priestly caste, subjugating the old and decadent blood aristocracies as well as the exhausted Roman clergy. More than Wilhelm Meister, the very biography of Johann W. von Goethe is the model of this life project.221

But even at the time of its diffusion, the ideology of Promethean victory revealed its contradictions, which were not overlooked by the very literature that propagated it. On the one hand, there were “unknown superiors” who could guide the life of a talented young person for the better. On the other hand, it was also true that they could withhold their support, leaving the talented young person in utter helplessness while protecting less gifted and more conformist candidates from him. For instance, Napoleon Bonaparte’s career, which had once shone in the imaginations of ambitious and aspiring individuals as the emblem of limitless possibilities in the post-revolutionary era, had ended very badly, prompting deep thoughts.222 In Le Rouge et le Noir, Stendhal’s genius narrates the story of a typical opportunist of the new era who tragically fails despite his talent and relentless efforts. This theme appears in Balzac’s finest novel as well, whose title summarizes the experiences of thousands of young people who believed in the Promethean call of the Revolution and democracy: Lost Illusions.

But neither Stendhal nor Balzac saw much beyond the historical-cosmic circle in which their characters lived. In Balzac, the drama remains inconclusive, and Stendhal finds relief in skeptical and dilettante aestheticism.

After the vision of old Goethe, subtly hinted at in Faust, the need to reintegrate human creative activity into the supreme spiritual meaning of existence is fully affirmed—with full acknowledgment of its moral and philosophical consequences—by a single one among the greatest storytellers of the past century: F. M. Dostoevsky;223 it was the dominant theme in his fiction from his first major book. Crime and Punishment is, like the second Faust, the descent of a man from the heights of proud Prometheanism to the repentance that opens the doors to heaven. Attempting to free himself from all moral and religious restraints to give vent to his dominating impulse, the student Raskolnikov ends up becoming the helpless victim of his natural instincts, leading him to submit to the stronger: by distancing himself from God, he submits to the human dominator, the police—once again, Leviathan yields before Behemoth—and only regains his freedom when he falls at the feet of Sonia, the young prostitute who embodies humility, the feminine side of the soul, the one that perceives God and can lead to Him, in the same measure that, socially reduced to nothing, she turns her back on the kingdom of this world. Thus, Goethe’s prophecy is fulfilled:224

Das Ewige Weibliche
sieht uns hinan.

§32 The new Tables of the Law, or: The state as beadle

“The confusion of the languages of good and evil, this is the sign I give you; such is the sign of the State. Indeed, it is a symptom of the will to die”

  • F. NIETZSCHE225

The democratic egalitarian state is less a reality than an appearance. The new society, like all previous ones, has the same two ruling castes – priestly and aristocratic, spiritual authority and temporal power – that will exist wherever human beings cluster into a collectivity larger than a family; that will exist either explicitly, enshrined in the nominal political constitution, or implicitly, invisibly interwoven in the fabric of a constitution that does not recognize their existence but cannot prevent them from representing the true distribution of power; that will subsist as a secret code at the bottom of all political constitutions, be they democratic or oligarchic, monarchic or republican, liberal or socialist, because they are imbricated in the ontological and even biological constitution of the human being and are functionally compatible with any nominal organization of political power. They are a “constant of the human spirit”, which no constitution, law, or decree, even if founded on the will of the majority, can revoke.226

This is precisely why democratic society, falsely professing to equalize the distribution of power, had to elitize itself to a point that would be unimaginable to our ancestors. For one thing is egalitarian ideology, another thing is egalitarian society. That this ideology could become the instrument of the most formidable concentration of power in the hands of a few, is less an irony of History than a fatality inherent to the nature of power: not being able to eliminate the ruling castes, it hid them, thus increasing their power. And when they reemerge under names like “state bureaucracy” and intelligentzia, nobody recognizes them, because everyone believes that castes only exist in India or in the medieval past.

Our contemporaries, imbued with an illusion of equality, believe that the world is moving towards the equalization of rights, without questioning whether this goal can be achieved by means other than the concentration of power.227 This illusion blinds them to the most obvious realities, among which is the unprecedented elitization of means of power. The modern imagination conceives, for instance, the feudal lord as the epitome of personal discretionary power, not realizing that the feudal lord was limited by all sorts of bonds and mutual loyalty with his serfs, and moreover, had no means of violence other than a few knights armed with sword, lance, bow, and arrow. Man among men, he was seen by all in the countryside and the village, walking or riding alongside his servant, sometimes carrying him on the saddle, back from the tavern where they had both gotten drunk, and thus, in case of a serious offense, he could be struck, defenseless, in the vast fields where the shout is lost in the distance, by a avenging blade. By the peasant’s scythe. By a kitchen knife.

In comparison, today’s powerful individual is placed at such a distance from the dominated that their position more resembles that of a god among mortals.228 Firstly, the powerful are geographically isolated from us: they live in gated communities, surrounded by electronic gates, alarms, armed guards, and packs of fierce dogs. We do not enter there. Secondly, their time is worth money, more money than we have; talking to one of them is an adventure that demands crossing endless bureaucratic barriers, months of waiting, and the possibility of being received by an advisor equipped with infallible excuses. Thirdly, the nominal occupants of high positions are not always the true holders of power: hidden fortunes, hidden powers, hidden causes exist, and our requests, imprecations, and even our shots risk hitting an innocent facade, leaving the true recipient, whom we do not know, unharmed. We get lost in the overly complicated web of modern social hierarchies and have reasons to envy the serf who at least had the right to know who was in charge of him.229 After two centuries of democracy, egalitarianism, human rights, welfare state, socialism, and progressivism, here is the part that falls to us in this estate: the powerful hover above us in the golden cloud of unattainable divinity.

The serf also had the right to come and go, without passports or visas and without being searched at customs (the first landowner who decided to tax the crossing of his properties triggered a peasant rebellion and perished in a bloodbath; the episode inspired a novella by Heinrich von Kleist: Michael Kohlhaas). He also had the right to change territory if he disliked his lord and settle in the lands of the neighboring lord, who was obliged to receive him in exchange for a promise of loyalty. And finally, if he fell into the darkest misery, he had the Church’s lands, where everyone was free to plant and harvest, by an age-old right; the Revolution took over these lands and sold them at a low price, greatly enriching the bourgeois who could buy them in large quantities and creating the horde of landless people who went to the cities to form the modern proletariat and work sixteen hours a day, with no hope other than a future socialist revolution (which would revert them to a condition similar to that of Roman slaves). And if, through struggles and superhuman efforts, the trade union movement finally obtains for this horde an eight-hour workday and a five-day week, they are still below the condition of the medieval peasant who, on average, worked only about six months a year. Thus, the progress of nominal rights does not necessarily accompany an increase in real possibilities. But this distinction escapes the spokespersons of the progressive ideology, who confuse words with things and intentions with actions.

But, however complicated society may be, the dialectic of power in the modern state is diabolically simple: encouraged to use their rights, citizens demand more and more rights; the new rights, when recognized, become laws; the new laws, in order to be enforced, require the expansion of the fiscal, police, and judicial bureaucracy;230 and thus the State becomes more powerful and oppressive as human rights and freedoms multiply.

This process is not unconscious: in all First World countries, the State has become the overt pimp of all dissatisfied minorities, whose complaints it needs to justify its expansion, just as it once needed the support of great fortunes to suppress the social movements with which it did not yet know how to deal. Continuous protests and demands are necessary to keep society in a state of division and accelerated psychological change, which can only be managed by an omnipresent bureaucracy. They are also necessary to weaken all intermediate social powers so that the State can soar sovereignly over a sea of leveled and entropically disorganized human atoms.231

Therefore, the neoliberal ideology, so accurate in discerning the factors that obstruct or promote economic development, is mistaken when it suggests that the “streamlining” of the State — its withdrawal from “improper” activities — is automatically and obviously associated with a promise of greater freedom for citizens. For it is not only through the exercise of improper and incidental activities that the State oppresses people, but also — and mainly — from those that are most essential and proper to it: taxation, police, justice, public education. And these, instead of retracting in the new neoliberal framework, tend to grow disproportionately. The reason for this is twofold: first, that it was precisely to be able to expand them that the State withdrew from the economy; second, that as it unloads the economic burden, the State seeks new roles to justify its existence, and ends up intruding into all sectors of human life previously left to private arbitration.

This is a point that neoliberal thinkers must examine carefully, for theoretical contradictions within an ideology can be the seeds of future conflicts that go beyond the realm of mere ideas.

It is no fortuitous coincidence that, in First World countries, the overwhelming victory of capitalist economies has come along with the growing intrusion of the State into private morality. This happens equally in neoliberal and social-democratic economies.

In the USA, public authority now most directly and ostentatiously regulates all human relations, even the most intimate and informal, leaving nothing for the individual’s, family’s, and small communities' free decision232. Patriarchal power, for example, has ceased to be a natural right inherent to the human condition and has become a concession of the State, revocable at the slightest sign of abuse. A friend of mine, exiled by the dictatorship, gave up living in Sweden, where a hospitable government had given him free housing, medical assistance, and a hefty retirement, because he could no longer stand to live in a country where youthful insolence is protected by the police and where being a father means exposing oneself to all kinds of humiliations at the hands of a holy alliance between punks and bureaucrats233.

Education and mass communications — two sectors delivered to the empire of activist intellectuals who somewhat unconsciously are the most docile collaborators of the modernizing State — attack by all means the old community relations based on custom, religion, or the nature of things, to accelerate their replacement by relations artificially created by state administration or market dynamics. They cultivate, for example, the lie that the new generations escape parental control because, thanks to TV and computers, they become smarter every day — an assertion that is contradicted by the miserable cultural performance of the little geniuses as soon as they get to university or we give them a book to read. Sometimes they go further: they warn children about the serious dangers they run by trusting their parents instead of surrendering to the protection of the State. Recently, the Folha de S. Paulo, relying on a very crude statistic improvised by a police station, gave a headline to the Folhateen news that most of the rapes of minors are committed by parents. The same article, on a police or general news page, would alert adults to a social problem. In a youth supplement, it directly incites readers to suspect their parents, to trust preferably in the police and social workers — which is based on the assumption that there are no rapists in the class of public officials, let alone in the class of journalists and newspaper owners234.

The expansion of the State’s (and the intelligentzia’s) watchdog gaze into the private sphere has as one of its most serious consequences the reduction of the difference between the moral and the legal — a difference that, by safeguarding vital areas of human behavior from official intrusion, has always been one of the basic guarantees of civil freedom. Until a few decades ago, the head of the family who made a move on his maid would attract disapproval from his wife, children, neighbors, the parish — a moral punishment spontaneously inflicted by the community; and this punishment, being proportional to the offense committed, was more than enough to do justice. When the moral punishment is added to the penal and administrative sanction, the case has moved from the ethical to the legal sphere — and the State, under the pretext of protecting offended maids, in fact usurps one of the basic functions of the community, which is to supervise the moral conduct of its members.

The State becomes increasingly the mediator of all human relations, even the spontaneous and informal ones — a flirtation, a look, the mere rudeness of lighting a cigarette in a closed environment. Those, for example, who see something good in laws against smoking are blind to the monstrosity that lies in the fact that the legal-penal sphere invades the field of good manners.

A proof that the interference of the State aims less at protecting alleged victims of abuse than at suppressing old forms of association is that new rights legislations systematically prefer claims that divide men over those that unite them. Official protection of abortion, for example, turns women into autonomous units, deciding to have or not have children without the slightest need to consult their husbands. Procreation ceases to be a family decision and becomes a separate arrangement between the woman and the State: divide ut regnes invades the nuptial bed.

The State utilizes the claims of individual autonomy—claims particularly strong among the young, women, the discriminated, and the resentful of all kinds—as bait to trap them in the trap of the worst tyranny. By “liberating” men from their ties to family, parish, and neighborhood, protecting them under the immense network of public services that free them from the need to seek help from relatives and friends, offering them the lure of legal guarantees against prejudices, antipathies, feelings, and even glances from their peers—a legal guarantee against life, in short—the State actually divides, isolates, and weakens them, cultivating the neurotic susceptibilities that infantilize them, making it impossible for them, on one hand, to form true connections with each other and, on the other hand, to survive without state support and much professional help. With all differences leveled, each human being becomes an abstract and amorphous unit, the “citizen,” neither man nor woman, neither child nor adult, neither young nor old, whose sum composes the atomistic mass of the protected by the State—more defenseless and powerless the more burdened with rights and guarantees. Hence the alarming phenomenon of “prolonged adolescence”—hordes of citizens, biologically and legally adults, duly employed and enjoying their rights, but incapable of taking any personal responsibility in intimate relationships; perpetually waiting for someone else to do something for them; full of self-pity and indifferent to the suffering of others; constantly changing girlfriends, friends, therapists, plans, and life goals with the casual dexterity of changing socks. 235 If the bête noire targeted by all rights protection campaigns is always the adult heterosexual male, this is not by chance or mere feminist spite but by an intrinsic demand of the dialectic of power: in a society where every citizen belonging to this group is stigmatized as a virtual woman-beater, seducer of maids, and child rapist, it is not surprising that nobody wants to mature to join it; that everyone prefers to remain adolescents and, at least, sexually undecided—which is a sine qua non condition for the dissolution of characters in the entropic soup of “citizenship.” Thus, we evolve into a society where there will no longer be a distinction between adults and children, for everyone will be underage; where there will no longer be parents and children—only the innumerable multitude of orphans of all ages, gathered in an immense boarding school under the tutelage of the disciplinary State, each one with a shining badge of “citizen.” 236 And the situation thus created will have the power of self-multiplication: after infantilizing citizens, the State will claim the deficiency of their moral judgment to interfere more and more in their private decisions.

The direct intrusion into family relationships practiced by Folhateen exemplifies just one among dozens of ways in which the alliance of the modernizing State with activist intellectuals and market forces uses children and young people as “agents of social transformation,” an elegant term that means, in plain Portuguese, instruments of agitprop. The use of minors as vehicles of propaganda, although clearly an abuse of their innocence, has become so widespread over the past few decades that, desensitized by repetition, we no longer notice its immorality and criminality. It began, as far as I can verify, in the French Revolution. We saw this in the previous paragraph. Then it was assimilated by anarchists and communists: using fanatical boys to throw bombs at the aristocracy, these movements not only had an easily controllable army of recruits but also enjoyed the undeniable publicity advantage of juvenile martyrdom. In return, the capitalist industry discovered the advertising use of childish candor to sell all kinds of products. The use was twofold: on one hand, children posing in advertisements functioned as emblems, strongly appealing to popular sentimentality, of the exalted qualities that certain products desired to be associated with. On the other hand, if the product was aimed at the young audience itself—such as toys or sweets—it could count on the tremendous support represented by the pressure that hordes of young consumers would exert on their parents. In the 1960s, pseudo-mystical sects, focusing preferably on the youthful public, could rely not only on almost inexhaustible reserves of credulity but also on the undermining action through which teenage chatter was eroding the foundations of family trust, leading parents, desperate because of the ineffectiveness of their arguments, to end up surrendering and partially assimilating all sorts of new beliefs and manias, no matter how barbaric and foolish they were, in order to save what remained of domestic communication. However, the best of all came from the 1980s when virtually all organizations engaged in any kind of ostensibly humanistic, libertarian, educational objectives, etc., massively and universally adopted the use of child and youth marketing, thus becoming, through universal repetition, a legitimate and acceptable custom that no longer inspires us, as it would in less abject times, with natural repugnance. Nowadays, it is no longer radical parties or capitalist sharks that exploit infantile narcissism and juvenile vanity as instruments of pressure to make us do what we do not want, buy what we do not need, renounce our beliefs and values, and adapt to all sorts of idiotic whims to avoid social disapproval and not become pariahs. No: those doing this are no longer subversive organizations, unscrupulous merchants, and sects of eccentrics. They are educational foundations, NGOs run by prestigious intellectuals, governments, and international organizations like the UN, UNESCO—basically, those entities that profess to defend the highest human values, including… the respect for children and adolescents.

However, if it is already an intolerable disrespect to use them as instruments of large-scale campaigns whose origins they do not know and whose political implications they can hardly imagine, even more cruel is that this use is always and systematically based on the most blatant flattery of the pretentious vanity of their young audience, thus giving these hordes of mini-imbeciles to understand that nothing is beyond their understanding, no matter how immature and inexperienced they may be; that there is no subject, however subtle or obscure, in which their opinions and desires should not ultimately prevail, for, after all,

Morgen zu uns gehört237

—and because of the brilliant future to which they are called, they must already exercise their heavy quota of power today. For example, they must listen to the message of the intellectual caste, relayed by half-literate teachers, and take it to their homes, where they will impose—the messengers of modernity—the new values and criteria on their astonished parents. They must carefully read the Statute of the Child and Adolescent and, upon returning home, demand that their parents comply with the stipulations formulated there, according to the interpretation provided by the notorious legal knowledge of their teachers and the peculiar jurisprudential acuity of eight-year-old boys. They must receive the moral teachings conveyed by lively TV actresses—the highest authorities on matters of conscience, as we know—and then repeat them at home until father and mother, afraid of being left behind, end up adopting all sorts of trendy puerilities as if they were the new Tablets of the Law.

The use of children as “agents of social transformation” has formidable consequences, on one hand, for themselves and, on the other hand, for society as a whole. First, it leads them to an exaggerated sense of their own importance, making them virtually unfit for the limitations of adult life: the boy who, in adolescence, felt like a leader, a creator of collective destiny, will, upon entering the world of economy and work, be disappointed to see that he has now become an anonymous number, a nobody—and there will be no other way to escape the resulting depression than to hold on to dreams and youthful illusions, that is, acquiring the traits and symptoms of prolonged adolescence. 238 Second, it is evident that flattery of the most absurd pretensions of youth is one of the main causes of juvenile delinquency, which is growing alarmingly worldwide. The intelligentsia, which is the main culprit in using minors as instruments for marketing “new values,” then absolves itself of its responsibility, trying to attribute juvenile delinquency to economic backwardness and poverty—a flimsy excuse that a recent survey has strongly debunked. 239 Likewise, the class that propagated the fashion of free sex and the erotic cult of nymphets (celebrating, for example, Nabokov, Lewis Carroll, and the photos of David Hamilton) fills itself with hypocritical pride when denouncing sexual abuse against minors, suggesting that they are effects purely of economic inequality, for which culture has not contributed in the least, as if human actions resulted directly from the bank balance and not from desires fueled by the imagination.

Regarding the family, the idea of its natural alliance with the State is a myth. The State was only the protector of the family as long as it had to respond to the pressure from older social powers, such as the Church and remnants of the aristocracy. As soon as it rid itself of these troublesome allies, it revealed itself to be less a protector of the family and more a protector of divorce, abortion, and free sex.240 The reason for this is that the family and all traditional communities—religion, circles of friendship, leadership, and territorial loyalties—are by nature the strongest opponents of state authority, seeking to dilute it within a hierarchy of differentiated social powers and in a complex network of informal associations. Modern society is decisively moving towards the destruction of these intermediary powers and the human associations that sustain them, leaving individuals disconnected and powerless in the ocean of the free market, linked directly only to the State.241 The staggering number of individuals in Europe and the USA living without family, friends, or any human connection except with social welfare officials is the saddest demonstration of this fact. This army of loners is the inevitable residue of a misguided struggle for human rights.

Movements for rights, often led by pseudo-intellectuals with soft cores, never realize that their achievements come at the cost of the inflation of state power, the decline of human relationships, and the extinction of all basic moral virtues that make life worth living. The most compelling proof is the proliferation of new specialized police stations and courts that follow each new proclamation of rights: women’s police station, minors' police station, senior citizens' police station; a specialized police station for gays is already being considered; next will come those for the physically disabled, the insane, the obese, and perhaps even for eccentrics, tasked with protecting people like the author of these lines against those who call us eccentric. No serious evaluation of cost-benefit will fail to show us that, in each of these cases, the protection these newly created entities will provide for new rights is only a theoretical possibility, while the expansion of state power is the immediate, clear, and certain result of their mere existence. This existence, moreover, will have to be financed by all those who, never having abused a maiden, a minor, or anyone else, will pay to see their family authority contested by semi-literate and arrogant little functionaries, imbued with the mission of protecting, in principle, all children against all parents and all women against all men. And when it is finally evident that all this cancerous growth of bureaucracy has done nothing to diminish the violence that serves as its pretext, it will only be a new pretext to denounce the moral irresponsibility of citizens and justify the creation of more and more police, judicial, and welfare agencies, and so on. The State tends to feed moral irresponsibility to be able to feed on it.

Many people believe that the proliferation of NGOs proves a contrary trend—a tendency to limit the powers of the State and emphasize the spontaneous initiatives of citizens. NGOs may have emerged with this intention, but subjected to market logic, they cannot survive unless they grow; and they only grow when they gather in immense global conglomerates, which end up associating with state and corporate interests, losing all connection with their community origins.242

In Brazil, the schematism of the debate between “privatizers” and “statists” has made these contradictions of neoliberal ideology invisible to both its supporters and opponents—both deluded by the assumption that when the State intervenes in the economy, it intervenes in everything, and that when it withdraws, it leaves people free in all other aspects. The superiority of liberal proposals over socialist ones in terms of the economy should not lead us to be deceived into seeing neoliberalism as more than what it is: an ideology, with all the limitations of ideological thinking, including the tendency to prioritize expectations over facts and, with political ambitions in mind, to overlook what is happening in the depressing current reality of everyday life. For while from an economic point of view, the State and the market are antagonistic and competitive powers, the same does not apply to the administration of psycho-social life, where these two anonymous and impersonal giants often ally against all communal and familial ties, which constitute the last protection of human intimacy.

Although a market economy is clearly less oppressive for citizens than a socialist economy, the freedom for the market does not automatically guarantee freedom for consciences. To the extent that it implicitly and automatically assumes a connection that can only be created through conscious effort, neoliberalism fails to fulfill its intended role of opening the way to a freer society through a free economy. When an economic option becomes the predominant, if not the only criterion for determining the course of collective life, the inevitable result is that means become ends. And the market has a potential for enslavement as great and dangerous as that of the State.

The most ironic aspect of the socialism-neoliberalism confrontation is that today the defeated socialists, dissatisfied with the frustration of their plans in the new order, end up directing all their old statizing impulses towards shameless support for the intrusions of the neoliberal State into private life. In doing so, they become allies of their former adversaries in a joint effort to lead neoliberalism down a darker path. Having failed to socialize the economy, they console themselves by seeking to socialize everything else—including private morals and the intimacy of consciences. And the neoliberals, because they believe that preserving market freedom is more vital than anything else and perhaps to appease the resentment of the defeated, keep yielding, yielding, until the new State ends up constructing, on the framework of capitalist economy, a kind of socialist administration of the soul—the socialism of inner life.

It would be wiser—and I have to say this because in Brazil one cannot describe a state of affairs without the anxious audience demanding an answer to what to do—for the adherents of both parties, each faction preserving the purity of its viewpoints, to agree to subject the dispute to the criterion of higher values, those that give meaning and moral legitimacy to any economic option. In truth, from my perspective, if neoliberalism seems more sensible than socialism, I do not know which of the two options is better in absolute terms; I do not participate in the Brazilian habit of dogmatically opining on all questions, and I recognize that the complexities of the modern economy generally escape my understanding—a recognition that also puts me in the honorable company of at least one great economist, Alfred Sauvy, who stated that the growing complication of the international system has surpassed the bounds of human comprehension and become the economy of the devil.243

Therefore, I stick to what I can comprehend. And the point that seems fundamental to me is that the Enlightenment conception of the secular State, with all the sweet promises it brought to humanity, carried within it the germ of the State monopoly on the meaning of life: above religions, above individual consciences, it is the State—ruling or aristocratic caste—that, under the blessings of the intellectual caste—the priestly caste—is tasked with directing the process of modernization and thereby determining the meaning of collective life, moral values and criteria, right and wrong, truth and falsehood. Whether in social democracy or in neoliberalism, Ex Status nemo salvatur: outside the State, there is no salvation. This is the only question that matters for the fate of the world: are we condemned to live under the religion of Caesar, following one path or the other? If the answer is affirmative—and I see no way to escape the affirmative answer except through a hypothetical rebellion of religions against the state monopoly on the meaning of life—then a derivative question arises: is the submission of the world to the religion of Caesar the same as the submission of the world to Caesar? Will the universalization of the modernizing, Enlightenment secular State be the final glory and the globalized form of the American Revolution? Will the commissar-yogi, with all his Marxist verbiage, be, malgré lui, a servant of American imperialism?

Chapter 10 – On the edge of the world

§33 Return to MASP and entry into the Garden of Afflictions

“...Positioning myself outside the false disputes in my irreparable exile, being neither for some nor for others…” – A. DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY

Let’s recap our entire journey:

  1. The cycle of Ethics and the others in the same series represent a concerted effort to influence Brazilian intellectual life in a specific direction: they are a “reform of Brazilian intelligence” — intellectus emendatione — undertaken by a cohesive group aware of its goals.

1.1. The direction of this influence is clear: to establish as the foundation of culture a new body of beliefs, which through repetition will become consensual, removing from the public eye and subtracting from the discussion, as irrelevant or “outdated”, the contrary opinions. 244 To make debate unfeasible in this way, covering it under a simulacrum of debate. To exercise in this way hegemony over the Brazilian cultural panorama.

1.2. The ideas that inspire this operation ultimately boil down to the farce of the “materialist tradition”, in the light of which a vast reshuffling of the entire view of the history of thought is undertaken, so as to place at the center of philosophical evolution figures like Epicurus, Gassendi, La Mettrie, Sade et caterva, shifting to the periphery the great philosophies that cannot be absorbed into the materialist worldview.

1.3. To this end, they exploit as many occasional dissatisfactions as there may be in the public’s soul, channeling them into a revolt against the Spirit.

1.4. They also take advantage of the ignorance of novice audiences, incapacitated for a critical reaction, presenting the members of the organizing group as if they were the very embodiment of universal philosophical consensus. They sporadically include in the program of events one or another lecturer with contrasting ideas, but without significant personal expression — and above all who does not open an explicit polemic —, giving an illusory appearance of variety and pluralism to what is in fact a clever experiment in mental leadership. 245

  1. José Américo Motta Pessanha embodied this project better than anyone else, as editor of the series The Thinkers and as a prominent figure in São Paulo’s philosophical circles.

  2. The philosophy of Epicurus, which is one of the pillars of the new culture, is nothing more, as a theory, than cognitive skepticism ending in tragic dilettantism; and, as practice, it is a process of self-hypnosis that generates among its practitioners Boeotian credulity and a total lack of critical sense, making them vulnerable to all sorts of manipulations.

  3. Marxism has its roots in Epicureanism and represents, like it, an effort to suppress theoretical intelligence and replace it with rhetorical self-persuasion aimed at “transforming the world”. It represents the abdication of the duties of personal intelligence and submission to collective illusions that pass for truths by the force of repetition.

  4. The conquest of theoretical intelligence is the culmination of a process of personalization, of liberation of personal consciousness, initiated by Greek philosophy and completed by Christianity. It is against the exercise of autonomous personal consciousness that the currents that inspire the organizing group of the Ethics course are directed.

  5. The liberation of personal consciousness, consummated in Christianity, raises against itself the hatred of the nostalgics of Greco-Roman religion, of a collectivist and state nature, who gather under the formal or informal denomination of gnostics. This reaction will inspire much of Western thought, increasingly since the Renaissance. 246

  1. The Church, in seeking to establish an Empire, fell into the trap of the Roman restoration, helping to feed the imperial monster that would come to devour it.

  2. The restoration of the Roman Empire, in varied forms and adapted to the conditions of the time, is the goal that guides, in a semi-conscious manner, the political history of the West, marked by four great undertakings: the Empire of Charlemagne; the Holy Roman Empire of Otto I; the emergence of colonial empires; the secular empire (failed in Napoleonic version, but successful in America).

  3. The emergence of colonial empires shatters Christian unity; what remains of Christianity will be destroyed by the secular empire. Along with Christianity, other religions will be demoted to “permitted cults”, functioning as popular sects within the new framework of the secular Empire.

  4. The rupture of the Christian sense of life gives rise to two currents of ideas — naturalist and historicist — whose clash will constitute the Leitmotiv of modern cultural history, helping to consolidate the cult of cosmic — natural and social — deities, which constitute in substance the state religion of the New Empire.247

  1. The American Revolution, which incorporates the ideal of the secular empire, tends to globalize itself, dragging in its torrent all the intellectual and political forces that, in one way or another, end up involuntarily putting themselves at its service. It decisively and profoundly intervenes in the soul structure of all human beings within its reach, instilling in them new reflexes, new feelings, new beliefs that will constitute, in essence, the post-Christian culture, or more clearly: anti-Christian.

  2. The cultural reform operation undertaken by the organizing group of Ethics marks the insertion of Brazilian culture into the new imperial cult. Thus, curiously, the left-wing intelligentzia serves the rise of the Empire.

But — I ask in continuation — serving it willingly, by voluntary and conscious acceptance of the coordinates of the new time, exactly as the repentant leftists do today who form the neoliberal ranks? Or, on the contrary, serving blindly, like oxen that, pulled by the nose ring, do not know where they are going or who is leading them? Is the yogi-commissioner a high-priest of the imperial cult or a slave to the priest, acting as an officiant in the momentary parody of the three days of carnival, singing praises to a donkey-god placed on the altar in place of Christ and Caesar himself? Does he know or not what he is doing?

It depends. If we understand the term “imperialism” in the old sense of economic domination, of exploitation of the Third world for the benefit of mega-American companies, the answer is no: the yogi-commissioner, decidedly, would not be complicit in the imperialist exploitation of poor countries. He studied the Leninist theory of imperialism, maybe he read Hobson himself, and would not play the role of a servant of foreign capital. However, it happens that American imperialism fundamentally does not have an economic sense. We saw, paragraphs back, that the main focus of resistance to the imperialist ambitions of the US government were the big capitalists. We saw that the imperialist idea was almost a century earlier than the formation of big capitalist fortunes. To these observations can be added Joseph Schumpeter’s famous demonstration of the contradiction between imperialism and democratic capitalism.248

If things are like this, and if on the other hand the expansion and globalization of American power are equally undeniable evidences, then we are indeed facing a problem. Problem, Ortega y Gasset said, is consciousness of a contradiction.

The contradiction is resolved as soon as we understand that the imperial dynamics of the United States does not come from economic causes, but intellectual, cultural, and political: the United States is an imperial power because its foundation constituted a revitalization of the imperial idea; because the project of the secular empire that incorporates the Enlightenment conceptions of the State represented, at the moment of the foundation of the American Republic, the synthesis and result of the contradictions between priesthood and aristocracy, which for two millennia were the engine of European history; because the foundation of the USA represents the fourth and probably last translatio imperii; because the emergence of the modern secular State incorporated in the American Empire is, in essence, an expansive, revolutionary, modernizing project, destined to reform the world; because the American Revolution is, finally, the first step of the world revolution that, giving a “final solution” to the conflict between spiritual authority and temporal power, will absorb into the State, in alliance with the intelligentzia, all spiritual authority, neutralizing all religions of the world and establishing the religion of Caesar.

Next to this gigantic phenomenon, the Hobson-Lenin theory, as well as the dependency theory – its third-world grandchild wisely disowned by a sensible father – is nothing more than a transitory moment in the succession of ideological illusions through which the global intelligentzia, deceiving itself about its role in the course of events, was dragged unaware, and even against its intention, to swell the powerful current of the American Revolution.

There is only one detail left: to know how the Brazilian intelligentzia, in particular, came to be swept away by this torrent, still imagining that it serves its old ideals as always. And here the Ethics cycle at MASP can serve to illustrate, in miniature, what happened to the national left, the insensitive rotation of the meaning of its efforts.

Let’s start with the following observation: it was more than clear that this cultural enterprise had obvious and immediate political objectives, among which the main one was to capture for the strategy of the left the old moralist rhetoric of the right, to turn the spell against the sorcerer. In fact, there was no other reason to explain the interest in ethics shown, from 1989 onwards, by intellectuals of Marxist training, for whom ethical discourse is nothing more than an ideological “superstructure”, a deceptive agitation of verbal puppets against a backdrop essentially constituted by class struggle.

Not by coincidence, the Ethics cycle at MASP was organized by the most prominent intellectual of the PT, Marilena Chauí, then holder of the Municipal Secretary of Culture of São Paulo. This active unmasker of other people’s ideological discourse would never be interested in something as “superstructural” as ethics if she didn’t have very solid political reasons to do so. Which reasons, more specifically?

The fact that the “Ethics” campaign achieved its main victory with the overthrow of Collor led me to imagine, for a while, that moralizing chatter was nothing more than an improvised expedient for the purposes of low-level politics: to eliminate the multicolored financial trickery to establish in its place the red ideological trickery. That’s what I was saying in §1. Nevertheless, I found it extravagant to hypothesize that in 1990, just a few months after the president took office, the strategists of the left could already be preparing a deadly blow to be struck at Mr. Collor de Mello’s career. As ingenious as they were, it was not plausible that at that time, without any visible signs of corruption in the government, they could foresee, so far in advance, the future transformation of the ethics campaign into a campaign against Collor.

But in August 1993 came the news from the newspapers about the existence of a PT information network: led by deputy José Dirceu, a spy trained in Cuba, hundreds of militant informants formed a private secret service infiltrated in ministries, police, state companies and banks. This news retroactively supported the hypothesis I had dismissed as somewhat paranoid.249 Indeed, it was not at all absurd to suppose that the little KGB already had enough indications at the beginning of 1990 to justify the hope of one day being able to set up a Collorgate, avenging the humiliation that the conceited bon-vivant had inflicted on the left, and particularly on Mr. Luís Inácio Lula da Silva. While the “spies” continued their investigations, the campaign for “Ethics” was already preparing a psychological atmosphere conducive to amplifying the moral effect of the scandal when it broke out. There is no other way to explain the repercussion of these accusations, substantially the same as so many others made against previous governments and which died neutralized by popular indifference, except by the fact that this time, there was already in the air a hostile and vengeful predisposition, a desire to punish, which was only waiting for the identification of a suspect to pour out the hatred that had been accumulating, in preparation, against a hypothetical and vacant target; an atmosphere that, thickening little by little until the limit of unbearable pressure in the months preceding the decisive interview of Pedro Collor to Veja magazine, found in it the occasion for the expected discharge.

Later, in 1994, an interview with Herbert de Souza, “Betinho”, in the Jornal do Brasil, provided a better explanation. According to “Betinho”, the campaign, of which he was one of the mentors and founders, originated from a meeting of left-wing intellectuals at the headquarters of the OAB. The intention was not to fight corruption, about which nothing precise was yet known, but to offer an alternative against Collor’s neoliberal proposal. I then saw that my first understanding had been too narrow: more than toppling a president, the campaign intended to overthrow a regime, temporarily embodied in a president. Hence the ambiguity of the celebrations around Collor’s political corpse. The victorious army was divided into two enemy wings: one celebrated, with the cleansing, the revitalization of the regime; the other anticipated its next disappearance, announced by the president’s. Some were pleased with the return to morality. Others, with revenge against the military-business scheme, albeit late, symbolic, and achieved with the help of the same scheme, temporarily irritated with the agent who had abused their trust. It is not surprising that this last wing was more festive, that the other participated in the celebration with a mixed reserve of suspicion. For some, the restoration of decency was an end in itself. For others, it was just a stage in the “long journey of the left into the apparatus of the State,” as Antonio Gramsci would say: the beginning, they hoped, of days of glory. Among these latter were the leaders of the “Ethics in Politics”.

But if the campaign did not have a direct purpose of fighting corruption, where did the word “ethics” come from, apparently so misplaced in the context of a mere ideological confrontation between socialism and neoliberalism? The origin was dual: on one hand, it was a re-edition of the old debate between neocapitalist technocracy and national progressivism, which had occupied economists and political theorists in the 70s. For the first of these currents, represented especially by the then Minister of Finance, Antônio Delfim Neto, economic solutions should be guided by technical and scientific reasons, distancing as much as possible from political and ideological debate and all considerations of values. (The minister’s disastrous phrase that the economy is “aethical” elicited everything from moralistic tantrums to the grammatical objection that the correct word would be “anethical”). For the opposite wing, this was just another ideology: the pragmatism and neopositivism that seemed to inspire the minister were congenital allies of capital, which they defended with as much more efficiency the more protected under a façade of scientific neutrality; this neutrality, from the Marxist perspective, was nothing more than a projection of the bourgeois’s “metaphysical” abstractism, a subject who, living separate from productive activity, thinks in watertight categories and does not see the connections between economy, politics, and ethics.250 Against technocratic neutrality, this current, represented above all by Celso Furtado, an academic idol of the left, opposed an economic proposal based on explicit ends and values, therefore carrying an “ethical” appeal.251 Collor’s neoliberal proposal, based on ideas of rationalization and efficiency, suggested its ideal antagonist: against the inhuman coldness of “technique”, the humanitarian appeal of “ethics”. At the time, nothing was known that could incriminate Collor, and, in the poverty of perspectives of the opposition before a newly inaugurated government with a potent popular backing, nothing more interesting occurred to the leftist intelligentsia than to resurrect against him the stereotype of the old debate, which had yielded some dividends in the struggle against the dictatorship.

On the other hand, the word “ethics” was quite fitting because many of the intellectuals involved in the campaign had become readers and devotees of the “cultural revolution” theorist, Antonio Gramsci, in the years following the defeat of the guerrilla. In his plans for the communist takeover, Gramsci highlights a phase he calls the "implantation of the ‘ethical state’". The coincidence is only in words: in Gramsci, “ethical” is a technical term, which has nothing to do with what is generally understood as morality, honesty, etc., but only with the adjustment between social norms and the needs of production—a sense unrelated to ends and values and, ironically, very “technocratic”. But, as Goethe said, when one doesn’t know what to do, a word is like a plank for a shipwrecked person. The name of the campaign provided Gramscian intellectuals with the opportunity to try to implant the “ethical state” advocated by their master while, at the same time, giving the impression of fighting for “ethics” in the general and common sense, that is, for goodness and decency.252 It was clearly a performance, but soon after, the emergence of corruption evidence in the government, followed by plentiful displays of moral indignation, made the fiction plausible retroactively. The fight for the Gramscian “ethical state” became, ad hoc, a fight for proper morality. This fortunate coincidence allowed Gramscian alchemy to merge the radical left’s politics with the moralistic discourse that had been the trademark of the right, especially the UDN (National Democratic Union). There is no better trick to disorient an enemy than to imitate them: if they attack the simulacrum, they risk hitting themselves; if they leave it alone, intending to defeat it through indifference, it grows until it engulfs the original. This is how, in the following months, all the most conservative beliefs and feelings of the Brazilian people, especially the atavistic moralism of the middle class, were channeled, almost magically, in favor of the left. The campaign for “Ethics” won massive popular support and was celebrated as the dawn of national redemption. However, a subtle and half-hidden intention could not produce such a straightforward result. The ambiguity of the origins was transmitted, like an hereditary taint, to the subsequent course of action, whose effects became more ambiguous as they accumulated, until there was nothing left on the scene but duplicity and hypocrisy. What the campaign for “Ethics” produced in a frighteningly short period was not the moral regeneration of the country, but a psychological revolution that involved it in a mistaken and tragicomic struggle, of which the self-destruction of the National Congress, becoming more and more demoralized with each new impotent effort to moralize itself, was the most evident manifestation. What few realized is that the ethical demand of the campaign had been formulated in deliberately utopian, self-contradictory, and sterile terms, in order to wear down the political class in a succession of self-punishing rituals with no fruitful results, until it discredited itself completely and precipitated a general crisis of the State, where the left, already fully identified as the last moral reserve, presented itself to the people as the only hope of salvation. For those aware that, in Gramscian thought, profound psychological mutations are the primary target of a wide-ranging plan to be carried out essentially by a group of intellectuals, the multiple pieces of the puzzle begin to fit together, forming the two-faced figure of a moral perversion strategy in the name of morality: on the one hand, emptying old moral beliefs by degrading them and turning them into immediate political ammunition against the “class enemies”; on the other hand, more subtly, and among a more select circle of listeners, undermining the intellectual foundations of these beliefs, promoting a mutation of the very meaning of the word “ethics”, so that, cut off from any spiritual values and any ideal of higher life, it came to mean only a mechanical adherence to certain political slogans and hostility towards certain social groups, if not towards individuals in particular; above all, it ceased to be a rule for man to govern himself and became an edifying pretext for each person to project their guilt onto their neighbor, beatifying the instinct of denunciation and making gossip the primary virtue of the Brazilian citizen. In short, it was about reducing ethics to “political correctness”, making support for the left a religious obligation whose failure would have the unbalancing effect of a transgression, subjecting the sinner to terrible inner sufferings, to a feeling of exclusion from the human community, which the average person would not be able to endure without seeking the opportunity for a reconciling penance; an opportunity that the “Betinho campaign” conveniently extended to everyone at the right moment, with the precision of a divine timetable. As this campaign ultimately aimed, in its founder’s words, to implement the socialization of the means of production in the country, this is how, through charity, the stray sheep could be led back to the fold of socialist orthodoxy by the hands of a new Good Shepherd. Thus, the campaign for “Citizenship against Misery” served as the “right hand” of the new deity—the Hand of Mercy, blessing and redeeming, alongside the Hand of Justice, or Rigor, punishing, represented by inquisitors, extremists, and enragés of all sorts. Clearly, the two hands worked in harmony: Mercy was the support, the credit that guaranteed the good faith of the accusers and conferred moral legitimacy to all sorts of slanders. The twin campaigns of “Ethics in Politics” and “Action for Citizenship” harmoniously completed the two faces of a new religious pedagogy: the first taught the citizen to judge in order not to be judged, the second to write crookedly along straight lines. Surrounded on both sides, the sinner had no choice but to respond to the call for salvation. Betinho was thus elevated to a papal condition. While apparently staying above the political game, he retained the power to bless and excommunicate, to elevate any character to the beatitude of fame or to plunge them into the darkness of abomination.253 And how sensible it is for spiritual authority to ultimately arbitrate worldly conflicts, Betinho became, at least for a moment, the balance of national politics, with no one at that point remembering that the judge had been appointed by one of the litigating parties.254

The result was very close to being achieved: once the ideal of public morality and the rhetoric of the left were identified, anyone who opposed it or simply remained indifferent to its charms could not escape an embarrassing feeling of having become evil, a sinner, an implicit or explicit defender of immorality, or at least running the serious risk of being taken as such. The new sense of sin, pushing some into a debilitating purgative ritual and others into a futile effort to make a good impression, ended up paralyzing everyone, leaving the path clear for the left to move from hegemony (psychological control over the masses) to power (control of the State apparatus). Hence the convergence of the campaign and the cycle, the former directed at the masses, the latter at a more select group of potential opinion-makers: political and cultural combat form, in Gramsci, an indissoluble unity.255

In this context, the strategy of precipitating the political class into a crisis of self-inculpation emerged as a Habermasian contribution that Brazilian talent for improvisation grafted onto Gramsci’s strategy. In fact, Jurgen Habermas teaches the left the precept of the “impossible claim,” the struggle for the promulgation of intentionally idealistic and impractical rights and norms; a claim that, when not fulfilled by the State, generates a wave of moral outrage; and, when fulfilled, precipitates a crisis of legitimacy in which the State is accused of not obeying its own laws; so that, whatever it does, the authority surrenders defenseless to the blows of its enemies.256 Applied to a people that for centuries cultivated moral ambiguity, living by accommodations that sedimented in the depths of each soul a dense residue of poorly conscious guilt, the tactic of inculpation could only yield rapid and promising results: where everyone has something to hide, everyone is in a hurry to ascend to the podium of accusers to avoid being put on trial. Universal complicity suddenly turned into universal snooping, and the eagerness to denounce became not only a symbol of virtue but also a shield against others' indiscretion, a buoy to float unscathed on a sea of denunciations. In this way, out of pure fear, even those who opposed the left’s politics internally found themselves obliged to collaborate with it, with or without full awareness of the result this might lead to. Never in the entire history of Brazil did the left see the political landscape so clearly and skillfully guide the movement of the whole, where the individual pieces did not even suspect that their actions, which they took as personal and spontaneous, had been calculated from the outside to fit into the harmony of a general orchestration. Despite the subsequent unexpected change in the course of events,257 this phase of national life will be forever marked as a moment when the left believed it was very close to possessing hegemony and conquering power, making an intellectual investment so gigantic that, if it did not reach victory, it at least proved to itself that it deserved it. In fact, the Brazilian left, by mastering the technique of Gramscian Machiavellianism that inspired the campaigns for “Ethics” and “Citizenship,” not only ascended to the quasi-priestly condition of moral conductor of the nation but also achieved that standard of cold and cynical efficiency that it so envied in the local right and the left of other countries, finally redeeming itself from a history marked by naivety, utopianism, and a complete lack of practical sense, which often made it the object of ridicule by Russians and Chinese.258 If this maturation cost it the loss of moral sensitivity and the complete prostitution of ethical sense to the ambition for power, it is simply because it is a neurotic left, and young neurotics know how to achieve maturity only through the hardening of the soul.259 It just happened that this hardening was reflected in the souls and voices, giving the left’s candidates the appearance of deranged puppets, in front of which the skeptical voter judged it wiser to vote for Fernando Henrique. The left never expected this result, but since when does the left have any prophetic talent? The leftist priestly caste created the ideological and psychological assumptions on which the victory of the right was based.

Placed in its proper place within this panorama, the cycle of “Ethics” assumed a clear meaning, and seen as an expression of this meaning, Pessanha’s conference, with all its brutal falsification of reality, ceased to be a symptom of its author’s dementia or personal malice and revealed itself as a perfectly consistent political act with the worldview of the left, with the values that sustained it, and with the objectives of the strategy it determined. The theme of the conference itself, apparently so distant from local current events, found its reason for being there. In an operation intended to pervert the ethical sense of the population to lower it to the level of an instrument at the service of immediate political ends, no artifice could be more useful and effective, despite its antiquity, than the ethical pedagogy of Epicurus, which, if practiced seriously, will develop in man the moral acuteness of an armadillo. It was truly a stroke of genius.

However, on the other hand, the “ethical” discourse has, independently of the Machiavellian intentions behind the podium, a force of its own: it can contaminate anyone who intends to use it; it can even persuade the speaker himself, leading him to collaborate with the State he intended to destroy. Now, the democratic-Enlightenment ideology underlying the concept of “ethics in politics” is a much stronger current, at the present stage of world history, than the residue of Marxist beliefs that, for some of the campaign’s leaders, contained the secret and true intention of their efforts. Intending to use it, the left ended up serving it: the actor was swallowed by the lines of the character, just as the family of the madman, in Pirandello’s play, hypocritically representing the court of Henry IV to deceive the protagonist, ends up behaving, in everything and in every way, exactly like the court of Henry IV. In another of Pirandello’s stories, The Late Mattia Pascal, the character ends up discovering that his real person has less substance than his social “shadow”: an address, a marital status, a number on his identity card. The Pirandellian farce of “Ethics” ended up restoring, for the benefit of the right, a little of the ethics that the left intended to use as an instrument for its “long journey into the apparatus of the State”; and now, reduced to a spectator from outside the State apparatus, the left must disavow the fruit of its efforts, or else applaud it, pretending satisfaction, and declare that it was precisely this result that it intended. The farce within the farce returns us to reality: the American-style democratic State is the great beneficiary of the socialist strategy.

The strategic self-deception was already announced in advance by the self-deception in the realm of ideology. It is worth reviewing the case.

The dominant influence on the Brazilian intelligentzia in recent decades was, without any possibility of doubt, Marxism. It might be possible to say the same for the global intelligentzia, but in Europe and the US, it is certain that alongside the Marxist stream, there were powerful liberal, Catholic, and conservative currents; powerful not only in numbers but also in the quality of their representatives, as well as the intensity of their public action. The names of Friedrich Hayek, Benedetto Croce, Raymond Aron, Ortega y Gasset, Daniel Bell, Arthur Koestler, have marked the history of political thought, on the liberal side, just as much as those of Sartre and Althusser on the other side. Conservatism spoke with rare eloquence through the mouth of Saint-Exupéry, Georges Bernanos, T. S. Eliot, as today through Alain de Benoist and Roger Scruton. Nothing similar is observed in Brazil, where, after João Camilo de Oliveira Torres and José Guilherme Merquior, the voice of the right was only heard through Plínio Correia de Oliveira, too committed to a paramilitary movement for his ideas to count in a peaceful debate, and Gustavo Corção, too rigid — despite his brilliant talent — to play in a dialogue something more than the role of a censor. There was, later, Roberto Campos, but his argumentation, brilliant as few, is limited to economic-administrative themes, without being able to have a broader cultural scope, worthy of the merits of the former Minister of Planning. Similar merits and similar modesty of the range of subjects are observed in Aristóteles Drummond and Donald Stewart Jr.. Isolated as a monument in the middle of the Brasília plateau remains José Oswaldo de Meira Penna — the only polemicist who, in light of liberal assumptions, undertakes a more vast scale cultural criticism and, for the left, terrifying.260 But, in the face of these few names, extends like an ocean the dominant horde of Marxists, Marxians, neo-Marxists, socialists, progressives, left nationalists, etc. etc.

About this noisy and self-confident mass, the fall of the Berlin Wall had one of the most singular effects: it made them go back in time, and, no longer able to flaunt the name of Marxism as a leftist motto, rediscovered, as a substitute for their lost revolutionary ideal, the Enlightenment of the 18th century. A typically Brazilian accommodation: a way of ceasing to be Marxist while remaining Marxist. For Marx had already prepared for these people the ruse of the retro operation: if Brazil could not become socialist, it was simply because Historia non facit saltum, and before the Russian Revolution we had to carry out… the French Revolution. The rediscovery of this ruse was the relief after the minute of terror — that terror that invades a troop of boys when foreseeing the depression that will follow the end of a bloody game (as in Lord of the Flies by William Golding). Not knowing how to live without a revolutionary ideal, not conceiving another sense of life other than the sense of History, the leftist troop, devoid of a rule of the game, had come to see the bottomless abyss of a Beckettian despair. But, as soon as the trumpets announced the resurrection of Diderot and Voltaire, Condorcet and D’Alembert — soon joined by La Mettrie, Sade and other famous libertines —, in an instant the deflated balloon of national leftism saw itself inflated again, changing rhetoric as one changes underwear: instead of fighting capitalism, the case now was to fight against the agrarian oligarchy, the Catholic morality, etc.

This was not, after all, so different from the old strategy of the Communist Party, which proposed the alliance of the left with the “national bourgeoisie” against the “feudal lords” of the Northeast, supposedly allied to American imperialism for the spoliation of their serfs.261 Thus, just like the New Age follower, who, finding difficulties in this life, decides to undergo a hypnotic regression to solve the problems of a previous incarnation, the left retreated in search of a Bastille that was easier to overthrow than modern capitalism. The speed with which the adaptation was made well shows the levity, the fatuity of the national intelligentzia.

Now, the only place in the world where the Enlightenment ideals were realized to the maximum extent possible of human faculties were the United States. The French Revolution, a useless slaughter, was followed by almost a century of ups and downs, and France only stabilized as a democratic republic around 1870, when the USA had already become a great power. The two world wars of the 20th century had as the only lasting result the final destruction of the European colonial powers and the rise of the USA to the status of a global Empire: Nazifascism and the USSR were, within the larger course of History, only dialectically absorbed moments in the perfectly clear line of development leading from the Masonic Revolution to the globalization of the secular state and the Americanization of the world. The legitimization of the US as the world’s police (globalcop) — even in the eyes of a considerable part of the supposedly hostile Islamic world —, at the time of the Gulf War, represented the highest point, so far at least, of an irresistible rise of the global Empire: by accepting the American political philosophy, we voluntarily place ourselves under the government of those who promote it, just as, among the ancient peoples, copying the Lex romana and submitting to Roman rule were one and the same thing.262

What prevented the world’s intellectual elite from seeing something so obvious were two factors: on one hand, the widespread belief in the Hobson-Lenin theory, which made the independence of political, cultural, and psychological imperialism invisible in relation to supposed economic motivations; on the other hand, the residual belief in the vitality of the idea of “nation”: it was believed that the impulse of national independence could resist the expansion of imperialism, when in reality, the emergence of the concept of the nation was just one of the dialectical moments that led, as we saw paragraphs ago, to the birth of the world Empire. The Empire, in fact, does not suppress nations since, by definition, it consists of independent kingdoms, different from each other, which it only subordinates and coordinates for global purposes that each kingdom does not need to fully perceive. The anti-colonial struggle of the Third World cannot harm the emerging Empire in any way, whose power is based on entirely different foundations than those of the old colonial empires. It can only help it, to the extent that it leads the new nations to adopt, along with socialist verbal subterfuges, the institutions and much of the ideology of the American democratic state. By adopting the strategy of fomenting nationalist revolutions in the Third World, international communism imprisoned itself in the trap of the American Revolution.

From a strictly legal and political point of view, the globalization of the Empire is indeed a benefit for smaller nations, previously subjected to the whims of secondary powers, such as the old European empires or the USSR; the world Empire guarantees them a universal court before which they can, on an equal footing, fight for their rights with much less wear and tear than in bloody wars of liberation. As Bertrand de Jouvenel demonstrated, the expansion of the rights of the small nations always occurs at the expense of intermediate hierarchies and the formidable concentration of power in the hands of a few. Jouvenel’s diagnosis is the political version of what Weberian “rationalization” is in the sociological field.

From an economic point of view, the advent of the world Empire is also advantageous, it seems. The arguments of Roberto Campos, Paulo Francis, J. O. de Meira Penna, Donald Stewart Jr., and other neoliberal polemicists (and their supporters) in favor of the internationalization of the economy, as far as I can understand them, are very solid, and the left has only opposed them with growls and imprecations, where there is nothing to comprehend.

But politics, law, and economics, detached from the lively background of the social fabric, are just abstractions, in the pejorative sense of the term. And when examined from the perspective of their psychological, cultural, and spiritual consequences, the rise of the global Empire is, as we have seen throughout the last chapters of this book, a chilling threat. The defeat of communism, of course, should be celebrated by all sane-minded men, and if the expansion of the Empire was the price we paid for the end of the Soviet nightmare, so be it: we paid without hesitation. But, on the other hand, the conceptual antagonism of political forms named “neoliberalism” and “socialism” or “social democracy” tends to obscure the fact that what is proposed as a future perspective to a post-socialist world is not neoliberalism “in itself”, as a mere abstract structure of a possible State, but neoliberalism embodied in the concrete form of the Empire, and, moreover, strongly tinged with social democratic elements. The fate of the world is not decided today in a conflict between possible regime forms, but rather, behind this apparent conflict, in the internal contradiction of the imperial State, which seems to only be able to grow at the cost of the destruction of the spiritual legacy from which it extracts its only possible moral legitimation. It is in this and only this sense that Daniel Bell’s expression about the “end of ideology” can be seen as useful: in the new global framework, it is no longer about a conflict between ideologies – even though a two-century-old habit induces many intellectuals to continue seeing things from this perspective -, but rather a confrontation between the spiritual elements and the ideological elements within the imperial State, a conflict that due to the expansion of this State spreads to the whole world. It spreads to the point of contaminating even those forces that, nominally, are or see themselves as most antagonistic to the Empire: for in the heart of the Islamic world what we see today is that resistance to imperial expansion ends up hardening and de-spiritualizing the Muslim tradition, fossilizing it in the bellicose and coarse simplicity of so-called fundamentalism,263 that is, reducing religion to an ideological recipe like any other, making each new jihad only serve to de-vitalize and reduce to a horrific caricature the tradition it imagines to defend. If, on one side of the world, the secular imperial State usurped the mantle of Christ, on the other side atheistic Zionism usurped the authority of Moses and fundamentalist ideology usurped the Quranic message brought by Mohammed. What is at stake in the world is therefore not a mere conflict between ideologies, but rather the possibility of spiritual survival of humanity in a world where all disparate and antagonistic ideological options have joined in a pact among enemies to sweep from the face of the Earth the legacy of the ancient religions – at least the three great religions of the Abrahamic group -, from whose credit these ideologies parasitically feed. The total secularization of the imperial State brought with it the secularization of all conflicts, the lowering of all religions and all civilizational values, the degradation of all the motives for which men live and die. Those who see, today, that a century of conflict between socialism and capitalism ended by the rise of the global Empire where socialist and capitalist elements were absorbed and surpassed in the ideology of the secular State, understand that the end of ideological dualism, being a reality, does not effectively have the sense given to it by Daniel Bell, but rather that of the enthronement of a kind of super-ideology – the “de-vitalized half” of the Christian body – which finds no competitors today in the world except two other equally de-spiritualized and lowered to the condition of ideologies ancient religions.

Intellectuals, of course, generally do not see things on this scale, but insist on squeezing everything into the narrow frame of references they have become accustomed to in a century of ideological warfare. Thus, they do not see other options than artificially restoring the old ideological conflicts, in a kind of regressive fury that insists on not recognizing the passage of time, or else celebrate under the deceptive name of “end of ideologies” the victory of one of them, without realizing that, in defeating its Soviet enemy, the Empire ascends to the condition of sole bearer of the supreme scepter of secularizer of the world, stripping itself of all religious scruples that the struggle against communism obliged it to preserve. The fact is that, with communism buried, the United States returns to being the central seat of the world Revolution, just as in the 18th century it was its cradle. And the nominal heir of the Christian tradition assumes its post-Christian, or anti-Christian, identity precisely at the moment when the other two great neighboring religions also find themselves de-vitalized, secularized and cut off from their spiritual sources. For the first time in the history of the world, humanity faces the danger of a complete rupture with the Spirit, of a total immersion in “absolute historicism”, of a total closure of the door of the heavens.

In the face of this danger, it is necessary that, in the new global framework, every man committed to the defense of the Spirit, recognizing the globalization of the Empire as a fact, and even partially as a good – in the sense that democracy preserves some nominal freedoms that are precious for the survival of the thinking human being -, maintain a sharp critical sense and know how to demand from the Empire what should be demanded from every social and political organization: that it serves the meaning of life, instead of usurping it in a new idolatry. This means, strictly speaking, abstaining from any ideological stance (whether in the sense of a nostalgic restoration of dualism, or in the celebration of the new uni-ideological framework), and systematically resisting the very notion – inherent in all ideologies – that some political regime, good or bad, should have over human souls a spiritual authority comparable to that of a religious tradition. For me personally, it doesn’t make much difference, in this respect, whether the organization of society is social democratic, neoliberal, or even fascist or communist: if there is freedom, I will enjoy it with pleasure and, in tyranny, I will be grateful for the opportunity to be useful in some way in the fight against the tyrant. The two hypotheses only differ from the point of view of physical comfort: for the realization of the meaning of life, one is as good as the other, and indeed the worst regimes sometimes bring out the best human qualities, ready to dissolve as soon as order and freedom are restored (the national left under the dictatorship gave us the best proof of this). The realm of the Spirit, which I intend to inhabit, is not of this world, and it is the only necessary thing, the only thing that makes life worth living. Every social, economic, legal, or political ideal, no matter how preposterous it may be, is worthy of being defended by whoever believes in it, as long as it does not fall into the propter vitam vivendi perdere causas. No regime, no State, has the right to act as the sovereign interpreter of the truth, subjugating individual consciences, for it is in these, and not in it, that the gift of intelligence lives and shines. And individual consciences have and will never have any other source to seek inspiration and strength than the legacy of the great spiritual traditions. They are also the source where every ideology, every political regime, seeks its legitimacy: they judge all ideologies, and are judged by none.

Neoliberals are completely right in pointing out the United States as an example that capitalist democracy is – to say the least – the least unfeasible of political systems. But the merits of the American system are not due to the democratic idea as such, much less to capitalism as such, but to the fact that both, in order to absorb and Hegelianly neutralize Christianity in the new society they generated, had to Christianize themselves at least in part. Christian values, deeply rooted in popular mentality, have constantly served as beacons that limited and disciplined the movements of the State and the market, giving an ethical and even spiritual meaning to what by itself has none; and, as political discourse was fatally interpreted and judged in function of these values, even the politician who did not believe in them, even the strict observant Mason, had to behave outwardly as a Christian. Very often the Catholic principle – “act as if you had faith and faith will be given to you” – ended up prevailing in practice, and the Christianity of mere pose ended up giving to political acts a full-fledged Christian sense and effect. The most characteristic example is Abraham Lincoln. This man devoid of any inner belief in a personal God, this devotee of the American State which in his eyes was the living embodiment of historical fatalism conducted by the anonymous Providence of an Enlightenment god, was nevertheless a diligent reader of the Bible. But at the same time this self-made man who encouraged the spread of the legend of his lack of education was an old-fashioned scholar, a profound connoisseur of the rhetoric of Cicero, Quintilian, Hamilton, and Burke. He read the Bible as a rhetorician, in search of material and inspiration – and not only filled his speeches with biblical quotations, but mimicked from the speeches of religious preachers much of the characteristic pathos that distinguishes his oratory and makes it one of the most powerful in the English language. The result was that the people, bypassing the subjective intentions of the individual Abraham Lincoln, gave his words and acts a Christian meaning, and Lincoln, while achieving his supreme goal of preserving the unity of the providential State, ended up entering history as the liberator of the slaves, whose fate interested him as little as the salvation of his own soul, and as an example of a politician inspired by Christian ideals: the priest of Caesar became an apostle of Christ264 – yet another unintended result, confirming Weber’s definition of History.

Similar examples could be multiplied indefinitely: the hypocrisy that dons the mantle of Christ somehow Christianizes itself. This is where one sees the wisdom of St. John Chrysostom’s counsel, that it is more important to confess Christ with the mouth than with the heart: because the mouth is under our command, and the depths of our heart only God knows. God is less demanding of man than the dogma of modern sincerism – a kind of reverse hypocrisy, which demands from souls a utopian purity only to more easily plunge them into the abyss of exhibitionist self-accusation.265

At the same time, it is notorious that the American creed – democracy, law and order, voting, freedom of the press, etc. – only gradually and thanks to prodigious efforts of generations of propagandists spread among populations that, long before, already carried Christianity in their blood, as they descended from the first Christian people in Europe. It was thus inevitable that democratic ideas would spontaneously receive a Christian interpretation, which ended up making the United States this living contradiction: a secular Masonic state, where an elite of skeptics and enemies of faith governs the largest Christian population in the world.

Hence, two facts of utmost importance. First, as the State unmasks itself and shows its secularizing intent to society, Christian forces, feeling expelled from the land promised to them, tend to take refuge in a bitter fundamentalism, hostile to all progress that nonetheless materially benefits them. The internal conflict of the Protestant conscience that inspires capitalism and then reacts violently to the inevitable political-social consequences of capitalist progress is a Leitmotiv of American history. The second fact: as society, following the fatal course of these consequences, becomes de-Christianized, the contradictions of the political system also become patent, the irrational side of a democracy that at the same time endlessly expands the rights of citizens and subjects them to the oppressive surveillance of an omnipresent legal bureaucracy and manipulates them with a thousand and one devices of scientific social control; contradictions that Christian culture alleviated, cushioning their impact against the padded background of an ethical coherence that gave a sense of unity and universality to the various currents – which, left to themselves, quickly assume the irreconcilable and eternally hostile figures of Leviathan and Behemoth.

Long before modern studies on “civil religion,” Friedrich Karl von Savigny had already perceived that all the legislation of the modern world were expressions of Christian values, implying that this Christian background gave them a unity, a meaning, and a protection without which they could not survive for long without falling into the state of “legal fictions”. The democratic State can only dress itself in an aura of religious prestige to the extent that it yields – and yields a lot – to the influence of religion; and, as soon as it frees itself from religion, it loses authority and legitimacy; it repeats in this the eternal cycle of the ruling caste, which, generated by a priestly caste, subsequently rebels against its creator, only to finally precipitate itself into an abyss of errors and madness.

In the American case, things seem to be calculated somewhat differently, in that the priestly caste is not Christian, but Masonic. But – and this is the crux of the drama – Freemasonry only exercises a part of the functions of a priestly caste: it is the esoteric, the inner, secret or discreet rite, that shapes the mentality of the intellectual and governing elite, while in the outer or exoteric kingdom, the soul of the people continues to be formed, today as always, by the influence of the Christian clergy – Catholic or Protestant. From this, we understand that the rise of the Masonic government takes advantage of the Christian prestige attached from the outside to the values and principles of democracy, but it is not capable of giving these values and principles, once deprived of the Christian sap that feeds them, a force of autonomous subsistence: the victory of the Masonic elite carries within it the seeds of its own destruction, to the extent that, the more society secularizes, the less coherence, credibility, and functionality democratic values have in the name of which this elite came to power and governs. The least unviable of regimes will end up becoming unviable when it finishes corroding, in the name of democracy, the religious principles to which the democratic idea owes all its substance.

Attached from the outside, I said. These words express my conviction that the conception of society as a more or less homogeneous block of economy, ideology, politics, culture, and “common sense”, where the only real antagonisms that exist are class conflicts266, is purely ideological, if not fantastical. On the contrary: religion and economy, for example, are autonomous forces, as proven by the fact that religions can survive for millennia, fundamentally unchanged in their dogmas despite all economic changes, not to mention the possibility of transplanting a religion from one country to another, even separated by centuries of uneven economic development and by chasms of cultural and psychological differences. The profile of a given society, taken at any moment of its historical development, only constitutes a block for methodological hypothesis purposes, but the religious, ideological, ethnological, etc. elements that form it can be heterogeneous in their origin and continue to be heterogeneous and conflicting – the conflict resulting, precisely, in the dynamics that will mark the history of that society. I repeat what I said before: the dialectical synthesis only exists in the realm of ideas; on the scale of historical facts, many of the great changes do not come from any synthesis of previous elements, but precisely from the impossibility of synthesizing them in practice, despite all human efforts. The impulse for synthesis – which is one of the sources of the civilizing effort in general – is a constitutive requirement, internal, of the human mind, of the individual human mind, and not a historical law. In history, what is seen is the clash between this impulse and the tremendous forces of division and decomposition – starting with the very fact of death – that permanently oppose the human unifying effort and, within the very heart of the most organized societies, constantly bring about the most barbaric conflicts and the most insoluble contradictions, referring unity to its own sphere: the sphere of the ideal and the extra-worldly – to which correspond, on the political-ideological plane, only those caricatures of paradise that receive the name of utopias.

The essential heterogeneity of the forces that composed the American ideal – Freemasonry and Christianity – could be concealed for a while, precisely for the same reason that allowed Abraham Lincoln to pass in public as a great Christian leader: for the reason that his intentions (in themselves neither Christian nor anti-Christian, but, let’s say, extra-Christian) were accepted as far as the people interpreted them as Christian and ended up Christianizing them. As the Masonic ideal of the democratic secular state is realized, it assumes itself as independent of Christianity and, to the same extent, reveals its own weaknesses and contradictions. It preaches, for example, that we must respect human life as a sacred good, while teaching in schools that it is nothing but the fortuitous result of a combination of atoms; that different cultures must be preserved in their purity, as long as they agree to lose all vital importance and become tourist adornments to beautify the Masonic-democratic culture; that man has the right to worship God in the manner of his religion, as long as he places the laws and institutions of the secular state above this God; that sexual freedom is an inalienable right, as long as homosexuals do not practice sodomy and heterosexuals do not make erotic proposals to women; and so on, in a permanent contradictory stimulation that is at the root of the violence and madness that today mark American society and all societies that have come under the orbit of the ideological influence of the American Revolution. Many analysts of the American phenomenon are already realizing that democracy depends on certain virtues existing in the people that it did not create and cannot create, but that it received ready-made from Christian civilization and that do not survive the de-Christianization of society.267 Everywhere what is seen is the complete failure of the attempt to overcome the old religious ethics by a secular ethic; because the unity of the secular ethic resides in the religious interpretation that is made of it, or rather, that is projected into it. No ideology, no political program can have the universality and breadth of a religion – let alone its unifying and meaning-giving power. The roll of the dice in which the powers of this world share the mantle of Christ will never abolish the unpredictable movement of the Spirit, which drags empires and nations like the wind drags through the deserted streets, in the dawn that follows a rally, the tattered paper with the grotesque faces of the demagogues tinged with mud, spit and beer splashes.

As long as we are contaminated by the prejudice, half Marxist, half sociologist, that religion is an expression of society; until we realize that it can be precisely the opposite, an impression received by society from outside or from above; until we even understand Schelling’s lesson,268 according to which myths and religions dictate the enabling field within which social, cultural and political forms are erected, we will not understand what is happening today in the American Empire and in our own backyard. And as long as we do not absorb this lesson, we will also not learn Bertrand de Jouvenel’s, according to which religion and only religion, understood as a symbolic bearer of universal truths and objective values, can offer effective resistance to the unlimited growth of political power – even and above all that exercised in the name of religious pretexts. Even and above all, because religious law, not being able to be changed at human will, is the superior instance where all conflicts between factions, whether they are religious or political, are arbitrated, while all political legislation, being the expression of the ideology of a winning group, is always a biased judge when judging the defeated. If religions – all of them, or practically all – have already proven to be able to adapt to all cultures, all societies, all political constitutions, it is because they exist and prevail on a plane of universality superior to that of all cultures, societies and political constitutions. It is because, as the Apostle Paul said, the spiritual man judges all and is judged only by God. In the absence of spiritual authority – which is not at all confused with the hierarchies of any ecclesiastical bureaucracy, but resides in those men in whom the very spirit of religion is manifestly manifested -, power is the only judge. Democratic or oligarchic, communist or capitalist, monarchic or republican, social democratic or neoliberal, it will always be the power of Caesar, with an unrestrainable tendency to self-divinize. And as long as we do not understand these things we will continue to bet on this or that political system, not seeing that the merits of any political system depend essentially on its knowing how to respect the limits imposed on it by the religious conscience of the people, vivified by the presence of the spiritual authority and based on values that precede by far the birth of this system and the society it governs; that precede it, perhaps, from eternity.

If today we cannot give up either the democratic state or the Christian background without which it loses all meaning and transforms into the neo-totalitarianism of “political correctness”, and if on the other hand the anti-Christian dynamics of the secular state seem to be a fatality inherent in the very constitution of the new Empire, this shows what was said paragraphs above, that the rupture between Freemasonry and Christianity is at the root of the contemporary tragedy.

It is also necessary to acknowledge, on the other hand, that some of the most vigorous reactions to the anti-spiritual culture of the new Empire spring from within the United States itself. Despite all the dominant anti-spirituality, half of the American population still attends Sunday worship, Catholic or Protestant, which is enough to question the omnipotence of the new culture.269 It is also in the United States where the most powerful nucleus of resistance to the advance of official atheism is found today — ranging from communities that organize against the abortion law to the spiritual elite concentrated around figures like Seyyed Hossein Nasr — an exiled Iranian —, Huston Smith, Victor Danner and others, deeply influenced by the thinking of Frithjof Schuon, a first-rate spiritual man and the inventor of the only valid method ever conceived for comparing and bringing religions together.270

But it is still true, nevertheless, that much of the North American spiritual resistance is lost in ultraconservative hysterics and nationalistic snarls — sometimes vaguely fascist — that make no sense in the new framework except to show that, within the American body, the contradiction between Empire and nation still exists — a contradiction in which the reader will have no difficulty recognizing a residue of the ideology of colonial empires. And finally, it is a sad truth that much of this resistance is inspired by an attachment to religious exclusivism of a fundamentalist nature, which only serves to generate mistrust among believers of various religions and foster, through division, the official atheism of the Empire.

But, if even the Americans aware of the anti-spiritual nature of the new Empire end up serving it involuntarily, out of attachment to prejudices that blind them, how much more will the progressive intellectuals of the Third World, prisoners of myths that constitute, under various disguises, the very essence of the imperial cult?

No, they do not know what they do.

The leaders of Brazilian intellectual reform want to guide the people without knowing who guides them. They are blind and naive at the heart of a shell of vanity and presumption. At the heart of their erudite appearance, they are uncultured, unprepared, and not very intelligent. They fascinate the audience, but they do not even imagine who speaks through their mouth. They also do not know where they lead those who listen to them: and thus they drag the public to the Garden of Delights, without knowing that it is, in fact, the Garden of Afflictions. And there, again, “the Son of Man will be delivered to the chief priests, and to the scribes, who will condemn him to death. And they will deliver him to the Gentiles to be mocked, and crucified, but on the third day he will rise again”.271

Post-scriptum – Epitaph: de te fabula narratur

“The arrogance of the nihilistic man rises,
with tragic greatness, to the pathetic
of heroic self-valuation”

– KARL JASPERS

Thus ends our journey — the tour of two millennia of History of Ideas, which was necessary for us to understand, order, and clarify all the mishmash of poorly digested erudition, ideological myths, crude feelings, and flowery speech, which make up the cerebral formula of a typical Brazilian intellectual from the period between 1964 and 1994. The whole forms the portrait of a ventriloquist’s doll, who, not knowing who speaks through his mouth, echoes the message of universal evil and lie, believing and making believe that he teaches the path to wisdom. For while we, in the audience at MASP, listened to Motta Pessanha, hideous gods continued their triumphant march amid clouds of fire, indifferent to the voice of the doll that mechanically repeated his speech in a forgotten corner of the Third World.

It’s horrible, isn’t it? Well then: to those who, before the intellectual corpse of José Américo Motta Pessanha, here exposed in all his sad deformity, indulge in the malicious consolation of laughter and irony, I say: which of you, scribes and hypocritical Pharisees, is free from every stain that you now see in him with the clear eyes that I reluctantly lent you? Which of you, at least before reading this book, was not more like in one aspect this enemy of wisdom? Which of you can throw stones at him, condemn him, expose him with uncompromised and sadistic joy to the ridicule of future generations, without in the same act spitting in your own face, stoning your own chest, whipping your own back? For I, for my part, assure you: I cannot. I do not throw the first, nor the second, nor the last stone: I do not see how to condemn the one who, without any guilt other than that of the collective madness that dragged him to the worst philosophical excesses through applause and flattery, stands before my eyes, pathetic and melancholic, not as a criminal to be punished, but as a victim of the intellectual tragedy of an entire country and an entire era. For, at a certain point in our History, all the myths and illusions that Brazilian intellectuals clung to out of despair, but which were divided among them in unequal portions and varied composition, condensed in the soul of José Américo Motta Pessanha, making him a living compendium of the errors of his caste. This is why he exercised such magical attraction precisely on those who least understood him. This is also why it is so difficult to condemn him: he erred in the name of everyone. Which of us, one day, driven by anguish or voracity, did not place aestheticism above moral duty, ideological passion above the rights of truth, power above knowledge, the charm of words above the evidence of things and facts? Which of us did not believe one day that our repugnance for the state of affairs gave us a special dignity and a license to lie, deceive, cheat, as long as it was in the name of our sacrosanct political indignation? Only, we did it more cautiously, piecemeal and intermittently, stopped halfway by a mysterious pull of common sense or hypocrisy, while José Américo Motta Pessanha dove to the depths of error, drank to the end the cup of universal falsehood, with a kind of heroic self-deception. This made him the emblem of the pains and madness of an era. This made him the victim of those who believed in him.

No, masters of letters: I do not expose the emaciated and disheveled body of this victim to feed your irony, but so that in her you see yourselves and before her you can confess, at least to yourselves: – I was no better. You, who applauded him in life when he gave expression and authority to your lowest feelings and your most absurd aspirations in insane words, do not abandon him now, when he lies here, his philosopher’s profile torn into rags. Solidarity, in misfortune, with the one you celebrated in glory and joy. Pray for him, for you and for me. For his sin was that of all of us.

Rio de Janeiro, July 1995

Postface: What has changed in the world two decades later?

A conversation with Olavo de Carvalho on the twentieth anniversary of _O Jardim das Aflições.272

Silvio Grimaldo – Professor Olavo, in this conversation, I would like to clarify whether and what you would change or correct in the book O Jardim das Aflições_, which completes 20 years since its first edition. Since that time, you have developed your political theory, adding new concepts and analyses that would certainly enrich the history of the idea of Empire as told in the book. Among these more recent developments, I can mention your discovery of the Revolutionary Mentality and the unity of the revolutionary movement throughout the history of the West in the last three centuries, the theory of the three competing globalist blocs, and, finally, your view of American society, which seems to have changed significantly since your move to the USA. In_ O Jardim, American society appears as a reincarnation of the Roman Empire, but now in a republican, democratic, and Masonic version. However, your articles for_ Diário do Comércio present a different America, more conservative, more Christian, less revolutionary, and less expansionist than the one portrayed in the book. So, what has changed in your vision of American society and the USA in recent years?

Olavo de Carvalho – The fundamental thesis of the book is that the entire history of the West is marked by the idea of Empire and successive attempts to create it. The boundaries of this Empire are undefined, and therefore, it could expand infinitely until it becomes ideally a global Empire, with the extent of the visible world being what is understood as global in each epoch. For example, the Roman Empire once covered almost the entirety of the known world. As the geographical borders expand with the great navigations, the prospects of the Empire also broaden. But this permanence of the idea of Empire seemed natural and inherent to political power, which is inherently expansionist. As soon as power centralizes, organizes, and structures itself, the tendency is to expand. Expansion is primarily motivated by an instinct of self-defense and aims to eliminate external enemies. As long as an Empire has external enemies, it is not entirely secure and ends up imitating the Roman Empire, which gradually subjugated its potential enemies until there were only internal enemies left.

From the dissolution of the Roman Empire, there is an interval, let’s call it the feudal balance, a situation in which there was no central government and the power structure was fragmented. When the Empire fell, the senators, landowners, the ruling class fled to their estates outside Rome and created independent centers of power. Then, they had to negotiate with each other, and although there were conflicts, no power could overpower the others. With the restoration of the idea of Empire with Charlemagne, the situation begins to change. Charlemagne’s Empire dies with him, as his heirs conflict with each other, make disastrous mistakes, and the power dissolves, but the idea of Empire remains.

Later, when the Empire fragments due to the rise of nation-states, each of them, as soon as formed, asserts itself as an Empire. They not only set out to conquer neighboring territories but also distant territories. We are talking about the time of colonialism when nation-states invaded regions in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. At this time, several competing projects of Empire began to emerge: the Portuguese Empire, the Spanish Empire, the British Empire, etc. The great achievement of the British Empire, which was the colonization of America, ends disastrously with the American War of Independence fragmenting the Empire. And the nation that emerges from this process asserts itself in the same act as a new Empire, out of the sheer need to expand and occupy territory. The Empire advanced sometimes through violent means, as happened in Texas with the war against the Spanish, and sometimes through peaceful means, as in Louisiana and Alaska, which were purchased.

It doesn’t seem to me an exaggeration to say that the idea of Empire guides the political life of the West since the fall of the Roman Empire. Naturally, each of these attempts to form the Empire is inspired by the Roman Empire. So, what we have is a series of successors to Rome. Even Russia clearly proclaims itself as the Third Rome. But the successful Third Rome was the USA. The architecture of Washington clearly has a Roman inspiration, and all the Founding Fathers were inspired by Roman examples; they all read the Lives of Illustrious Men by Plutarch and tried to be, clearly, what was called “Men of Plutarch” – in other words, they had a very clear ideal of a ruler. For this success, there was the coincidence of two factors: on the one hand, a set of material circumstances that impelled expansion, and on the other hand, the residual strength of these Roman symbols that gave their successive imitators the idea of what could be done. So, the history of the West is marked by successive reincarnations of the idea of the Roman Empire, culminating in the American Empire.

However, at the time I wrote this book, I only knew about American culture through what was exported by the mainstream media and the American publishing market, in other words, only that exportable “official” culture. The idea that reached me was that of the politically correct Empire. An Empire that was created under Masonic inspiration, with the idea of neutralizing religious differences through the use of a secular State, which does not take sides in the conflict between various religions and, precisely for this reason, becomes the arbiter of these conflicts. To arbitrate, it is necessary for the State not to have its own religious content or doctrine. Thus, the notion of a theologically empty State is created: a purely political-juridical structure, not theological. At that moment, political-juridical thought supersedes religion. Religion becomes only a matter of individual preferences and ceases, therefore, to be a comprehensive interpretation of universal value, becoming only the conviction or belief of certain groups. And what becomes the general belief, the doctrine of society, is the political-juridical structure of the State. In this sense, the American Constitution is above all religions. It judges religions.

This is the first effective incarnation of the secular State since the French secular State has been declining from crisis to crisis more and more. The project of the French secular State was a failure, while the American one was truly successful.

When I moved to the U.S., however, I began to become aware of an entire local culture that isn’t exported, which, although very vigorous within, has no voice in the world and is virtually ignored abroad. I’m referring to the whole conservative and Christian culture, which, to my great surprise, was much more vigorous here than I could have imagined. When I lived in Brazil, I imagined that the Christian conservatives here were a bunch of bumpkins who had no influence on society. In part, I was deceived by the tone of superiority with which the left referred to this conservative culture, as in the movie Deliverance,273 where four executives decide to go canoeing on a river in Georgia and encounter a bunch of rednecks and hillbillies, terribly hostile, malicious, and mentally retarded, who pursue them through the mountain and cause a series of disasters. This image, that there exists an enlightened, progressive, law-abiding America, and another barbarian America that inhabits the interior of the country, is an inverted view, because in these regions that are populated by bumpkins and rednecks, crime is minimal, or even null. Whereas in the regions considered enlightened and civilized – the large cities and state capitals, like New York, Chicago and Washington –, crime is rampant and uncontrollable. Violence is there, not in the countryside. And Hollywood films transmit an exactly inverted view. Those they portray as backward, violent, and murderous bumpkins, are, as I discovered in rural Virginia, where I live, the most educated, kind, and civilized people in the world. Meanwhile, in large urban centers, we find all sorts of barbarity and violence unknown in the rest of the country. Moreover, this Christian conservative culture is presented only as a popular residue, without greater intellectual elaboration. But when you look closely, you discover that the intellectual vigor of this culture is astounding.

In Brazil, however, this culture doesn’t reach. The U.S. produces this conservative culture for itself, while the politically correct, from the secular state, represents the force of imperial expansion, transmitting its ideology and thinking to the rest of the world, wanting to shape it in its own image and likeness. Christian conservatives are only interested in competing within the American framework, with no interest in converting the population of other countries to conservatism. This was another element that appeared inverted in Brazil, by which I let myself be deceived, reasoning from the sources I had. The idea of American expansionism, for example, which was presented to me as a guideline of the conservative right, was in fact the defining activity of the progressives, who want to impose the American system on the world. In the same vein are the neocons,274 but they are not conservatives.

Neocons are people who came from the left and created a justification for the imposition of American democratic institutions on the rest of the world, like George Bush ended up doing in Iraq, imposing a secular state by force. In other words, the neocons adopted a clearly revolutionary doctrine, and despite the influence they had on Republican governments, they were an infinitesimal part of the right, but they appeared, especially in France and Brazil, as the quintessence of the American right. But neoconservatism fits perfectly well the definition of a revolutionary movement, which advocates the creation of a new society, a new historical situation, through the concentration of power. It is not surprising, therefore, that most of them came from the left and received Marxist training, and that none of them were really religious people. Most neocons were of Jewish origin, but disconnected from religious Judaism. That is, they were Jews, who became disillusioned with Judaism, then with Marxism, and decided to make another revolution, using the means of the American state for that.

When I got here, I started reading the material produced by conservatives and realized that they represented a culture much more vigorous and superior than that of the progressives. In all debates, what you see are conservatives gaining a significant advantage. And soon I realized that there was a competition between intellectual and cultural superiority against an administrative and financial superiority. The book The New Leviathan, by David Horowitz,275 shows that the amount of money collected by the Democratic Party and the left is many times greater than the funds of right-wing organizations. The difference is so huge that it becomes almost incomprehensible the balance of election results, which always present small differences between winners and losers. So, how does this conservative right, with little money, manage to compete with this monster subsidized by Rockefellers, George Soros and tutti quanti? The answer lies in their own relentless intellectual vigor, which is abundant. This culture doesn’t stop producing ideas, raising debates, publishing books, etc. In the end, I ended up seeing that this America, which from Brazil seemed like a bunch of bumpkins, is the center of American intellectual life. The rest is just the production of a worn-out ideology and a discourse that has already been discredited.

Therefore, the idea of the U.S. as a Masonic republic, committed to the construction of the secular state, evidently exists, and it is this image that is imposed as the image of America in the rest of the world; however, internally, things are not exactly like this. Inside, there is a fairly balanced struggle between these two Americas.

Silvio Grimaldo – From what you just said, it occurred to me that there are two imperial tendencies within the US. I can clearly see the neocons, as you say, committed to exporting an American model of institutional organization, with formal democracy, elections, parliament, press freedom, and free trade, to other countries. But the progressive forces, aligned with the Democrats, seem to me to be committed to exporting something else, another vision that practically submits the US to a foreign force, such as international organisms. It’s not exactly the American model, but a global model, using the American state as a means of imposition. But wouldn’t this put the survival of the American system itself at risk?

Olavo de Carvalho – Yes. This is an ambiguity of the system. The idea of expansion, of westernizing the world is common to both currents, but the interpretation that each one makes of westernization is different. Actually, there are three different interpretations. There are those of the leftists, which is to end all public authority of religion, transforming it only into a personal option and leaving it cornered, and creating a state authority superior to everything and that provides the general worldview. It’s this current that brings secularism, feminism, gay rights, animal rights, and all this cultural heritage that arrived in the US through the Frankfurt School and formed what we can inadequately call cultural Marxism. The second current is the neocons, who want the same thing, to expand institutions, but putting the emphasis on the American state, which should become the world’s police. And thirdly, there are the conservatives proper, the paleocons, who are less interested in expanding American power than in defending American sovereignty against its enemies and keeping society faithful to its original traditions, to the constitution, to the Founding Fathers, etc.

These three lines intersect. The neocons no longer have as much expression as before, leaving only the left and the paleocons. Among the latter, some are so radical to the point of preaching total isolationism, like Ron Paul; others advocate a moderate but firm security policy. On the other hand, on the left, there is also a terrible internal ambiguity, because at the same time as they wish to expand this cultural revolution to the entire globe, they want to have alliances with the Islamic world, which, from a moral and cultural point of view, is extremely reactionary. The American left carries this contradiction, placing, for example, radical feminists and militant gay rights advocates as allies of the most violent chauvinists known in history. This ambiguity, however, helps the revolutionary movement, which lives on its self-contradiction, because it cannot stabilize with a definitive ideal that can be realized in society, and therefore judged by its results; the revolutionary movement needs to continue indefinitely, and therefore needs contradiction and internal conflict.

This, then, is the current situation: there are the paleocons, among whom the libertarians and isolationists, like Ron Paul, and those who have a vision more oriented towards the military self-defense of the territory and American interests, but both are basically inspired by the same values, differing only strategically. But overall, this conservative worldview is incompatible with that of the secular and expansionist state, which wishes to impose American hegemony or export these elements of the cultural revolution.

Silvio Grimaldo – But during this period it was not only your perception of the cultural foundations of American society that changed, but your own theory of the Empire evolved. In the debate with Alexandre Dugin, you defend the thesis that today there are at least three global governance projects in dispute. Even though not all three are reincarnations of the Roman Empire, they are clearly imperial projects.

Olavo de Carvalho – Although the interpretation I presented on the history of the idea of Empire in The Garden of Afflictions is correct, it is incomplete with regard to the USA. And it was precisely thinking about this gap that it seemed necessary to remap the whole set of analysis, because, at that time, I was interested only in the historical evolution of the West as successive rebirths of the Roman Empire. I needed to broaden the picture and that’s when the theory of the three globalist blocs came to me: the Western Anglo-Saxon, the Russian-Chinese communist, and the Islamic.276

Both the Western globalist bloc and the communist bloc are inspired by the Roman Empire. The Islamic bloc does not share this inspiration, as it believes that Islam has already surpassed Rome. What is the Roman Empire compared to the Universal Caliphate? Nothing! In addition, the Islamic bloc has its own source, the Quran.

And where do the Christian conservatives in America fit in? They are out of this game. They are not a voice present in the world. They could be if there were, alongside these three global projects, a Christian globalism, but that does not exist.

Silvio Grimaldo – Wouldn’t this Christian globalism be the very missionary nature of the Catholic Church?

Olavo de Carvalho – The Catholic Church could have taken up this project. You can read in Malachi Martin’s book, Windswept House,277 the story of the conflict between John Paul II and the globalist elite. This elite intended to transform the Catholic Church into a kind of general management of religions, that is, to abolish what Catholicism has that is specific and dissolve it into universal ecumenism. The Catholic Church would have to accept other religions as equal, dissolving doctrinally, losing faith, but consolidating as a political power, subsidiary of the Western globalist elite. John Paul II did not say either yes or no, trying to play with these elements, taking advantage of the Church’s contact with other religions to absorb them. In a way, his intention was to turn the globalist game upside down. It did not work because John Paul II died – and the following popes are as lost as blind people in a shootout. John Paul II was a stunning genius. Benedict XVI is also a genius in a way, but a theological genius, not a political and strategic genius like John Paul II. He understood all the political forces at play in the West. Meanwhile, Benedict XVI was concerned with defending Catholic doctrine, remaining only on the defensive.

With John Paul II, the prestige of the Church in the world grew extraordinarily. He entered the communist world knocking everything down, like a bull in a china shop. Communist leaders were terrified of this man, who wherever he went gathered millions of people to listen to him. He got what he wanted and only did not do more because he died. And now we have Pope Francis, who although he is a very friendly man, whom everyone likes (even me), who in my understanding is a simple man. Now, it is not impossible to impose oneself just by friendliness, without the force, as John Paul II did, who had both. He attracted by friendliness when he wanted and terrified by force when necessary. I do not believe, in any way, that Francis understands what is at stake in the world today and what the conflicting forces are.

Silvio Grimaldo – In these 15 years that have passed since the writing of the book, in 1995, to the eve of your debate with Alexandre Dugin, would there not have been a further translation of the idea of Empire in the West? Does the emergence of this Anglo-Saxon globalist block not represent a new incarnation of the imperial project, since now it does not have the USA as its basis, but presents itself as supra-national?

Olavo de Carvalho – Yes. This new form of empire is no longer the American Empire, but rather the supra-national Empire, as Antonio Negri correctly observed. In this aspect, his diagnosis, which came out five years after The Garden of Afflictions, coincides with mine. This globalist elite already presented at that time an extra-national project, which can only not impose itself as global because it has two other great competitors, who also want to be global. It is important to note that this dispute between the three projects is neither linear nor simple. Sometimes they are in conflict, sometimes they cooperate with each other, and we cannot yet say how this story will end.

For example, the communist bloc needed to rebuild itself. China had to remake its economic system, introducing elements of the free market, so that the country would not die of hunger. And this reconstruction would be impossible without the help of the very Western globalist capitalists, who believed they could absorb China into their bloc. It would become an element of Western globalism embedded in the East. But that didn’t work. The Chinese pretended to give everything to Western capitalism, but they kept the power structure of the communist party and the army intact. In fact, they manipulated the entire West, showing that they are smarter than the globalist elite.

Silvio Grimaldo – More or less as Lenin had done with the NEP…

Olavo de Carvalho – Exactly. They repeated Lenin’s New Economic Policy, creating a capitalism that only exists in the economic sphere, without interfering in the legal and political sphere. The power structure remained intact.

Something similar happened in Russia, after the fall of the USSR. But instead of advantages, Western capital brought disadvantages to Russia. The entry of Western capital was made in a totally uncontrolled way and based on corruption, which led the country to lose money. This fueled a nationalist revolt against the West, a revolt that is embodied in the people of Putin and Dugin. This nationalist revolt is given a tone of imperial expansion with the Eurasian idea, which aims to unite all the discontented of the world against the West, including Muslims. This can even be done to some degree, but the Islamic bloc will never give up its idea of the Universal Caliphate to fit into the Eurasian Empire. They can’t do that, because Islam was born as an imperialist project, whose destiny is to dominate the world. It has been like this from the first day. Islam can pretend to give in to the Eurasian idea, but what they really want is to Islamize China, Russia and the West. Thinking about it, from an ideological and cultural point of view, Islam has more vitality than the Eurasian project, which is a global camouflage of Russian nationalism. But Islam is truly global. So much so, that if we look at the Islamic world, we will see that national interests always come second, behind their cultural and religious unity. In the Eurasian world, there is a permanent conflict between Russian national interest and the idea of Eurasian fraternity. Just look at Ukraine to know how this Eurasian fraternity really works…

The Eurasian project, however, is very singular. Its main ideologue, Alexandre Dugin, thought he could gather against the West everything that exists: communism, Nazism, esotericism, paganism, Orthodox Christianity, Islamism, etc. He made Eurasianism a bag of cats, which works precisely because of this confusion, as everyone can participate in it, based on the most mismatched pretexts. Anything serves as a justification to support Eurasianism. This can work for a while, but in the long run they will have to give in to the hardness of Islam, which will not be absorbed into Eurasianism in any way. The USSR already tried to dominate the Islamic world, creating leaders like Yasser Arafat. But the Soviet hand that entered there has already been withdrawn and these Islamic revolutionary groups have prospered and continue to prosper, even after the end of the Soviet Union. The Germans also tried to absorb the Islamic world. Nazism has been buried and Islam continues alive and vigorous. Islam, from this point of view, is incorruptible. It will never abandon its principles, on which its survival depends.

Silvio Grimaldo – What is the relationship of the globalist elite with the conservative culture that embodies the values of the American revolution?

Olavo de Carvalho – The traditional American discourse, of the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, can be used by groups who are interested in the exact opposite, as done by President Barack Obama himself. He presents himself as a realizer of the American ideal. But speeches about values and ideals are empty. They only gain meaning when they take form in history as concrete actions. The same body of values can be used to justify completely opposite actions. For this reason, I am not interested in what universities call political philosophy, which is the study of ideals and values separated from the concrete action that gives them all the meaning they have.

Hegel already said that when an ideal takes form in history, in concrete action, it necessarily produces its opposite; and from this antagonism is born the historical movement. That is, an ideal produces its opposite and can perhaps absorb it or be absorbed by it. Let’s take the example of equality before the law, which is a sacred element in the Constitution, in the speeches of the Founding Fathers, etc., but which can easily be transformed into a terribly anti-American force, favoring the destruction of the State, as in the Cloward-Piven strategy. This smart duo discovered that American social assistance only served 5% of the population that theoretically would have the right, because the other 95% did not need it. They figured that if they put the rest of those who had the right, but did not use it, into the welfare system, they could topple banks, bring down the system, and seize power. What they intended was to create a demand that was impossible to satisfy by government bureaucracy.278 And to do this, to create a crisis of gigantic proportions, they used all the language of the Founding Fathers of equal rights. Political theory only exists in the study of the historical and effective embodiment of political ideas, not in the study of values and theories.

Globalists need the American state. But their idea is to weaken the state externally, so that international organisms and economic groups can dominate it, but strengthen it internally so that it can control the population. But this is also practiced in Brazil. Our country is getting weaker, in a certain aspect, but the government is getting stronger over and against the population.

Now, how is it possible to use the same ideals and values to carry out a contrary policy? The trick is invariably the same: it is the quantitative expansion of rights, based on Mao Zedong’s qualitative leap. Social engineers know that if certain elements of democracy are quantitively expanded, democracy will turn into something else. It’s the so-called broadening of rights or democracy. But if democracy is broadened, it is automatically annihilated. Democracy is a rule of coexistence among certain groups, but the unlimited expansion of rights makes this coexistence impossible. As the number of right-holders increases, the central power that controls and guarantees these rights automatically increases. The discourse of rights expansion is made precisely to limit rights. In the end, there are more people who enjoy that created right, but there are fewer rights, as more spheres of decision pass to the discretion of the State. The whole Cloward-Piven strategy is based on this. This is how, in the name of equality, a terrible inequality is created between the governing bureaucratic elite and the rest of the people. This expansion of rights is promoted by the globalist elite precisely to increase in their hands, through control of the American state, the means of controlling the population.

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VEBER, Michel, Comentários à “Metafísica Oriental” de René Guénon, org. Olavo de Carvalho, São Paulo, Speculum, 1983.

VICO, Giambattista, Princípios de (uma) Ciência Nova (Acerca da Natureza Comum das Nações), sel., trad. e notas de Antonio Lázaro de Almeida Prado, São Paulo, Abril (Col. “Os Pensadores”), 1974.

VOEGELIN, Eric, A Nova Ciência da Política, trad. José Viegas Filho, 2ª ed., Brasília, Editora da Universidade de Brasília, 1982.

_________________, Order and History, 5 vols., Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1956-1987.

VOLTAIRE, Le Siècle de Louis XIV, Paris, Garnier, s/d.

WEBER, Max, A Ética Protestante e o Espírito do Capitalismo, trad. M. Irene de Q. F. Szmrecsányi e Tamás J. M. K. Szmrecsányi, São Paulo, Pioneira, 7ª ed., 1992.

______________, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, transl. and ed. by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, New York, Oxford University Press, 1958.

______________, El Problema de la Irracionalidad en las Ciencias Sociales, trad. José María García Blanco, Madrid, Tecnos, 1985.

WEIL, Éric, Éssais et Conférences, 2 vols., Paris, Vrin, 1991.

____________, Hegel et l’État, Paris, Vrin, 1985.

____________, Logique de la Philosophie, 2e. éd., Paris, Vrin, 1967.

____________, Philosophie Politique, Paris, Vrin, 3e. ed., 1971.

____________, Philosophie et Realité. Derniers Éssais et Conférences, Paris, Beauchesne, 1982.

WHITE, JR., William H., The Organization Man, New York, Doubleday, 1956.

WILSON, Edmund, Axel’s Castle, New York, Scriber’s, 1931, Cap. I; trad. brasileira de José Paulo Paes, O Castelo de Axel, São Paulo, Cultrix, 2º ed., 1985.

___________________, Onze Ensaios, sel. e prefácio de Paulo Francis, trad. José Paulo Paes, São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 1991.

___________________, Rumo à Estação Finlândia. Escritores e Atores da História, trad. Paulo Henriques Britto, São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 1987.

YATES, Frances A., Giordano Bruno e a Tradição Hermética, trad. Yolanda Steidel de Toledo, São Paulo, Cultrix, 1987.

____________________, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, London, Ark, 1983.

ZELLER, Eduard, Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy, Ed. Wilhelm Nestle, Transl. L. R. Palmer, New York, Meridian Books, 1955.

Credits

The Garden of Afflictions: From Epicurus to the Resurrection of Caesar: An Essay on Materialism and Civil Religion
Olavo de Carvalho
Published in Brazil
3rd Edition – January 2015

Editorial Management
Diogo Chiuso

Editor
Silvio Grimaldo de Camargo

Assistant Editor
Thomaz Perroni

Layout
Maurício Amaral

Cover
J. Ontivero

Editorial Board
Adelice Godoy
César Kyn d’Ávila
Diogo Chiuso
Silvio Grimaldo de Camargo

eBook Development
Loope – design and digital publications
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  1. Political Science: Theory and Philosophy 2. Materialism 3. Political Ideologies I. Author II. Bruno Tolentino. Title.

DDC – 320.01

Systematic Catalog Index

  1. Political Science: Theory and Philosophy – 320.01

  2. Materialism – 146.3

  3. Political Ideologies – 320.5

About the author

Olavo de Carvalho has been hailed by critics as one of the most original and audacious Brazilian thinkers. Men of diverse intellectual orientations, such as Jorge Amado, Roberto Campos, J. O. de Meira Penna, Bruno Tolentino, and Herberto Sales, have expressed their admiration for him and his work. The essence of his work is the defense of human interiority against the tyranny of collective authority, especially when bolstered by a “scientific” ideology. He believes in an indissoluble link between the objectivity of knowledge and the autonomy of individual consciousness, a link that is lost when the validity of knowledge is reduced to an impersonal and uniform formula for academic use.

Believing that the most solid refuge for individual consciousness against alienation and commodification lies in ancient spiritual traditions—Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam—Olavo seeks to give a new interpretation to the symbols and rites of these traditions, using them as the foundations for a philosophical and scientific strategy to address the problems of contemporary culture. His published works up to the present, including studies such as “Aristóteles em nova perspectiva,” “A dialética simbólica,” “A filosofia e seu inverso,” “Maquiavel, ou: A confusão demoníaca,” “Os EUA e a Nova Ordem Mundial,” and the series of articles “Cartas de um terráqueo ao planeta Brasil,” among others, reach one of its peaks in “O Jardim das Aflições.” In this book, some primordial symbols like the biblical Leviathan and Behemoth, the cross, the “khien and khouen” from the Chinese tradition, etc., serve as structural molds for a philosophy of history. It starts from an apparently minor event and uses it as an occasion to demonstrate the links between the small and the great, expanding in concentric circles until it embraces the entire horizon of Western culture. The subtlety of the construction also makes “O Jardim das Aflições” a work of art.

  1. And it is not only in Brazil that the decline of universities ends up revaluing self-taught learning: “To all my best undergraduate students, I tell them not to pursue graduate studies. Do something else, guarantee survival in whatever way, but not as university professors. Feel free to study literature on your own, to read and write alone, because the next generation of good readers and critics will have to come from outside the university” (Harold Bloom, “Harold Bloom contra-ataca”, Folha de São Paulo, August 6, 1995).↩

  2. And not only in Brazil, the decline of universities ends up revaluing self-taught learning: “To all my best undergraduate students, I tell them not to pursue graduate studies. Do something else, guarantee survival in whatever way, but not as university professors. Feel free to study literature on your own, to read and write alone, because the next generation of good readers and critics will have to come from outside the university” (Harold Bloom, “Harold Bloom contra-ataca,” Folha de São Paulo, August 6, 1995).↩

  3. South America: Observations and Impressions, London, Macmillan, 1912, p. 417. No trecho citado, o autor refere-se especificamente ao Brasil.↩

  4. Accustomed by long self-discipline to suspend judgment until finding evidence or sufficient proof, I am surprised to notice how deficient this ability can be in militant intellectuals who seek in an idea its power of mobilization rather than its intrinsic truth. The absolute lack of this ability may even become a conditio sine qua non for gaining respectability in certain university circles, mainly in North American but also some Brazilian, where the dogmatic assumption prevails that an idea or doctrine can be nothing more than the expression of the power desire of a class, a race, a culture, a country, and that, in this sense, collective pressure and authoritarian intimidation are not only legitimate but preferred means of intellectual debate. I perfectly understand that people intoxicated by this atmosphere may see or pretend to see a mere rhetorical trick in my statement of not having started from ready-made convictions. It will be of little use to claim that I was perfectly sincere, for, to these people, individual sincerity has no value, since the individual does not think and is always, willingly or not, knowingly or not, merely the ventriloquist’s dummy of a collective interest that jumps over the poor fellow’s intentions and speaks through his mouth whatever it pleases. I leave to these creatures the extremely scientific task of unearthing from the shadows the secret collective author of these pages, and I remain, in spite of everything, in the decidedly non-academic conviction of having written them myself [Note from the 2nd edition].↩

  5. “The Delights of the Garden: The Ethics of Epicurus”. Later published in the collective volume Ethics, São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 1991.↩

  6. The wave of national anger against Collor and later against deputies involved in embezzlement scandals becomes even stranger when compared to the persistent indifference towards the scandal of the “polonetas” (irregular loans to the communist government of Poland), which caused much more damage to Brazil than the former president and all the “dwarfs of Congress” combined. For two decades, the former ambassador to Poland, José Owsvaldo de Meira Penna, has been trying in vain to draw the attention of justice to the case, which has probably become taboo because it involves the entire elite of the so-called “barbudinhos” – the left-wing faction of the Itamaraty.↩

  7. I have documented enough of the general oddity of the national environment in O Imbecil Coletivo to spare myself from enumerating again here the signs of the mental pathology that affected Brazilian intelligence at that time. Just to give an example, a strange aspect that seemed to completely escape the best observers was noted in the second phase of the campaign – the war against João Alves & Co. – in an article I wrote for Imprensa magazine: “Given the investigative fury with which newspapers and TV uncover the cesspools, uncover the drains, and search the sewers of the Republic, it seems that Brazil, among all countries, has the boldest, most independent, most committed press in discovering and revealing the truth. But what is most admirable about it is the unanimity of its commitment to this goal. There is not a single newspaper, radio station, or TV channel in this country that abstains from the obligation to inform, that even discreetly tries to suppress accusations, protect reputations, or cover up suspects. Every single media outlet, without any visible exceptions, is aligned in the frontal attack against corruption, which they all denounce with one voice, with the harmony of a multitudinous choir conducted by a single will, a single spirit, a single criterion of values. In the army of public morality, there are no defections. It was the uniformity of the news coverage that allowed the public to fix in their minds the image of a Brazil divided into the just and the sinful, the heroes and the villains, without any ambiguities or middle grounds. An image in which the demarcation line of ‘ethics’ overlapped even party divisions, interests, and ideologies, ending up neutralizing them and leaving only two factions on display, that of Cain and that of Abel, the latter vociferating their indignation in the squares, the former skulking in the corridors, plotting coups, erasing clues, in a gloomy snake-like maneuver. This unanimity would not have power over consciences if it did not include, among the dominant themes of its discourse, the celebration of itself: the condemnation of corrupt politicians is at the same time, and often explicitly, the glorification of the free press that investigates and exposes them. No one hesitates to see in this phenomenon the beginning of a new era: led by the hand of the press, Brazil reaches the threshold of democratic maturity. But for someone who learned about journalism hearing that the press is diversity, that democracy is pluralism of opinions, this unanimity cannot help but appear somewhat suspicious. Historically, it is abnormal. Never, in any place or time, has a case been seen like this, of a nation as a whole abdicating its internal disagreements to form a united front under such a vague and abstract banner as ‘ethics.’ Not even countries at war, driven by the need to unite in defense of more tangible goods against more immediate and lethal dangers, have managed to homogenize to such an extent the discourse of their journalists. What is happening in Brazil is a unique phenomenon in the history of world journalism. A phenomenon that is all the more strange as the word ‘ethics’ was recently introduced into the Brazilian popular vocabulary and quickly, with stunning success, promoted to the status of a unifying ideal for an entire people. Never has a watchword emanating from a narrow circle of activist intellectuals spread so quickly across the breadth of a continent, without anyone remembering to object that the speed with which words spread is sometimes inversely proportional to the depth of penetration of ideas” (“Unanimidade suspeita,” in Imprensa, May 1994; reproduced in O Imbecil Coletivo) – If knowledge, as Aristotle says, begins with wonder, the lack of capacity for wonder is a serious symptom of mental apathy in our intelligentsia.↩

  8. This multiplicity of themes and approaches also explains the composite structure of this book—a mix of memories and philosophical essay, reportage and pamphlet, politics and metaphysics, esotericism and “fait divers,” comparative religion, and who knows what else—a thing, in short, that is uncategorizable, not expected to be signed by the same author of an exceedingly rigid “theory of genres” (see “Os gêneros literários: seus fundamentos metafísicos” in A dialética simbólica: estudos reunidos, op. cit.). But, by establishing such careful distinctions between genres, it was precisely to be able, if necessary, to mix them better. And, indeed, there is nothing that doesn’t fit into my definition of “essay.”↩

  9. Shortly after the events narrated in this “Introduction,” he struck again with a series called Artepensamento. On September 26, 1994, under the title changed to “Arte de Viver,” Pessanha’s lecture on Epicurus, recorded on video, was broadcasted by Rio’s TV Educativa, summarizing the cycle of Ethics from MASP, under the direction of the same Adauto Novaes who organized the 1990 event. This is how the death of a thinker gives more diffusion to the ideas he defended in life. Conserved and industrialized by technique, the Epicurean poison can now be mass-distributed, ennobled, and almost sanctified by the death of its local purveyor. In June 1995, the same group organized the congress Libertinos/Libertários, which included celebrations—paid with public money—for the bicentennial of the Marquis de Sade, and much praise for Laclos, Crébillon, and similar authors. All that’s left is to, as Paulo Francis would say, publish the complete works of Julius Streicher on bible-thin paper.↩

  10. The previous works were A Nova Era e a Revolução Cultural. Fritjof Capra e Antônio Gramsci and O Imbecil Coletivo: atualidades inculturais brasileiras.↩

  11. My only initiative, so far, to disseminate this more internal part of my work—with the publication of the book Uma filosofia aristotélica da cultura. Introdução à Teoria dos Quatro Discursos (Rio de Janeiro, IAL/Stella Caymmi, 1994)—led to more trouble than all my polemical writings combined. The episode is documented in Aristóteles em nova perspectiva: introdução à Teoria dos Quatro Discursos (Campinas – SP, VIDE Editorial, 2013).↩

  12. See Alexandre Herculano, “História da Origem e Estabelecimento da Inquisição em Portugal”, Lisbon, Bertrand, n.d., vol. I, p. 25.↩

  13. The number of falsehoods circulating about the Inquisition is astonishing. They constitute an important chapter of the popular folklore — the “common sense,” as Gramsci would say — that supports the belief in the superiority of the modern world and its intellectuals. Here are some:

    • The Inquisition delayed scientific development by prohibiting the circulation of books containing new discoveries. – Just examine the Index Librorum Prohibitorum to verify that none of the works of Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Descartes, Galileo, Bacon, Harvey, and others are listed. The Inquisition only examined books of direct theological interest that could add nothing to the development of modern science (in case of doubt, refer to A Inquisição, by G. Testas and J. Testas – see the Bibliography at the end of this volume).
    • Giordano Bruno was a martyr of science, condemned by the Inquisition for defending scientific theories. – Giordano Bruno made no discoveries, no observations, no scientific experiments. He did not even study modern sciences such as physics, astronomy, biology, or mathematics. The disciplines he taught were typically medieval: logic, grammar, and rhetoric – the trivium. He despised the new mathematical mentality, and all the mathematizing scientists, from Galileo to Descartes, showed great indifference to his work, whose greatest merit lies precisely in having anticipated much of what we can say against modern science today (see Paul-Henri Michel, La Cosmologie de Giordano Bruno, Paris, Hermann, 1975). He was not condemned for defending scientific theories but for practicing witchcraft, which was a crime at that time. I don’t know if the accusation was justified, perhaps it was not, but to those who consider it an absurd prejudice of bygone eras to impute any criminal character to witchcraft in general, I recommend reading Claude Lévi-Strauss’s essay, “The Sorcerer and His Magic” (in Antropologia Estrutural, trans. Chaim Samuel Katz and Eginardo Pires, Rio de Janeiro, Tempo Brasileiro, 1975), about the reality of deaths caused by witchcraft. — Additionally, recent historical research has revealed that Bruno was most likely involved in espionage activities against the Catholic Church (see John Bossy, Giordano Bruno e o Mistério da Embaixada, trans. Eduardo Francisco Alves, Rio de Janeiro, Ediouro, 1993).
    • The Inquisition instituted the persecution of Jews. – The killings of Jews, carried out by cunning debtors or fanatical monks, were an established habit in the Iberian Peninsula. Unable to suppress the enraged mob, the King of Portugal asked the Holy Office to take charge of usury cases, in order to remove any pretext that legitimized the atrocities of the “popular avengers”. By instituting regular proceedings, the Inquisition controlled and ultimately extinguished the killings. It is true that the Inquisition showed prejudice against Jews, but if we compare it not with an abstract and utopian moral standard but with the real alternatives existing at the time, we understand that it was a lesser evil: the only alternative was massacre (see Alexandre Herculano, op. cit.).
    • The Inquisition instituted widespread torture. – Torture was considered a legitimate procedure and was practiced everywhere since ancient Greece. For most of the Middle Ages, it fell into disuse, being reintroduced in civil justice thanks to the rediscovery — typically Renaissance — of the texts of ancient Roman laws. What the Inquisition did was to follow the prevailing practice in civil justice, but severely limiting it, not allowing the accused to be tortured more than once and prohibiting bloody injuries (see Testas, op. cit.). It was, therefore, the Inquisition that took the first effective step against the use of torture, which should be considered a milestone in the history of human rights. Unlimited torture was later reintroduced by the Communists in Russia, and their example was imitated by the Nazis and fascists.
    • Galileo’s trial was a case of inquisitorial persecution. – On the contrary, the trial was a farce, a far-fetched plan conceived by the Pope — Galileo’s godfather — to have his protege get rid of a group of fanatical inquisitors through a simple oral declaration without practical effects, after which he could continue spreading his ideas without further disturbance (see Pietro Redondi, Galileu Herético, trans. Júlia Mainardi, São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 1991).
    • In general, the philosophes are not unaware of these things, but speaking of them is not good for their health and would cause discomfort in the audience.

    ↩

  14. In fact, the legend emerged a little earlier: “The Middle Ages were slandered, at the beginning of the Renaissance, for vices that truly belonged to its detractors; history provides many examples of ‘transferred blame’… This impression of the Middle Ages is partly a product of the ‘Gothic Novels’ of the eighteenth century, with their grim portrayals of torture chambers, cobwebs, mystery, and delirium” (Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities, trans. Neil R. da Silva, Belo Horizonte, Itatiaia, 1961, p. 23). The proof that the old scenic apparatus of the “gothic novel” still works is the success of The Name of the Rose. Henry Kamen, op. cit., chap. 14, describes the powerful conjunction of interests that consciously produced the false image of the Spanish Inquisition.↩

  15. Why was this honor given to a single economist, to be listed among the philosophers, when he never published a single work of philosophical scope, and among his colleagues there were many who were full-fledged philosophers, like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises? The answer can only be one: from the USPian point of view, a Marxist economist is more of a philosopher than any liberal philosopher.↩

  16. The right-wing also has its philosophes, some of the first order due to the literary quality and political influence of their writings — De Maistre, Donoso Cortés, Maurras, for example — but they were omitted.↩

  17. In fact, many are published, but not the ones that are most needed. In Contraponto, Aldous Huxley says of a character that if they were given the superfluous, they would dispense with the essential. It seems that this is what Brazilian publishers think of their readers. We still don’t have complete works of Aristotle in Portuguese, and Carlos Alberto Nunes’s Plato, published by the University of Pará, has never reached the South-Marvel, which considers itself very cultured because it finds the latest national philosophical fashions in bookstores (i.e., foreign ones). We also lack the principal works of Hegel (we only have the Phenomenology and minor texts), Leibniz, Kant, Schelling, Fichte, Husserl, Dilthey, Hartmann, and I don’t know how many more. But we have almost complete Simone de Beauvoir, a lot of Foucault, a lot of Antonio Gramsci, not to mention Fielkenkraut, Fukuyama, and all the other philosophers with high turnover. That’s why, despite its distortions, the series The Thinkers has become, in the absence of competitors, an essential item in the national philosophical bibliography.↩

  18. Hence the somewhat embarrassed receptivity that these philosophical circles gave to the ideas of Richard Rorty, a pragmatist philosopher who argued that language cannot give an image of reality but only an expression of our desires, and that, unable to find “universals” in reality, philosophy must “fabricate” them through propaganda and political action. See the chapters “Relativist Trap” and “Rorty and the Animals” in my book O Imbecil Coletivo: Atualidades Inculturais Brasileiras (Rio de Janeiro, Faculdade da Cidade Editora, 1995).↩

  19. We will see, in the end, that this opinion is not entirely devoid of meaning but rather a deliberate deception.↩

  20. Lucretius, De rerum natura, V, 146 ss.↩

  21. Diogenes Laertius, X, §32.↩

  22. There would be nothing strange for an ascetic school to attribute to their gods the ability to produce effects through their mere presence, without the need for external action. In spiritual traditions in general, the capacity for “action of presence,” as it is technically called, is attributed even to saints and gurus. Moreover, the attribute of active immobility is one of the essential attributes of divinity in all religions.↩

  23. This objection is exactly the same as the one that Pessanha, as we will see later, raised against the philosophy of Democritus, without realizing that it also applies to Epicurus.↩

  24. In the world of contemporary pseudo-spirituality or anti-spirituality, there is no lack of those who interpret the Bible’s expressions about the “poor in spirit,” “innocence,” and the “little ones,” promoting the praise of mental deficiency. Nothing is more flattering to an intellectually incapable audience than to suggest that their stupidity is a superior form of spiritual aptitude.↩

  25. The fearsome metaphysical joker Georges Gurdjieff would reissue this theory in the 20th century, with a Buster Keaton seriousness that was enough to impress a crowd of intellectuals. He names it the “Law of Fall” and exposes it at the beginning of the book Tales of Beelzebub to his grandson, in a hallucinating language where it is impossible to distinguish what is said straightforwardly from what is said obliquely; he soon argues, with equal audacity, for the viability of perpetual motion, as if to unmask the previous fraud; but by then the oblique-minded reader is too dizzy to get the joke. Gurdjieff took diabolical pleasure in humiliating Western intellectuals, leading them to believe in the most blatant absurdities, only to unmask himself afterwards and thereby unmask the mental emptiness of his audience. He knew the vulnerable spot in every hard materialist’s soul, and he hit it mercilessly, until he crushed the poor man’s brain. The modern Western intellectual is, in fact, deeply incapable of detecting spiritual fraud, which he confuses with mere charlatanism, believing that precautions against the latter are enough to protect him from the former. Gurdjieff was clearly not a charlatan, but someone endowed with real powers, and it was enough for a Westerner to have verified this to submit to him with reverence and fear, taking him as a spiritual master. “When a man no longer believes in God,” said Chesterton, “it’s not that he doesn’t believe in anything: he believes in everything.” Gurdjieff proved this across the board; he showed that the modern intellectual’s supposedly rational defenses against religious illusion make him defenseless against spiritual fraud, just as a neurotic’s defenses against therapy make him all the more helpless against neurosis. A striking example is found in Muniz Sodré’s book, Jogos Extremos do Espírito (Rio de Janeiro, Rocco, 1990). Verifying the authenticity of the phenomena produced by the Minas Gerais thaumaturge Thomas Green Morton was enough for Sodré, a typical Brazilian social scientist with a Marxist background, to bow down before these phenomena as signs of the Spirit, without realizing that they were merely a demonstration of siddhis (“powers” in Sanskrit). Siddhis can be acquired through training, and for the spiritual man they represent nothing more than a misleading periphery of the Spirit, a nebulous zone where mere subtle forces of nature can be taken by fools as transcendental mysteries. The siddhis are spiritual pyrite. I will discuss this case in more detail in my booklet O Antropólogo Antropófago. A Miséria da Ciência Social.↩

  26. Which assumes that atoms have weight – an Epicurean premise which Democritus does not at least explicitly share.↩

  27. See Carlos García Gual, Epicuro, Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 1985, p. 110 ss.↩

  28. See below, §20, Nicolas of Cusa’s considerations on this point.↩

  29. Let no one confuse, driven by the verbal coincidence, the Epicurean indeterminism with that of Planck and Heisenberg. This opposes — logically, or dialectically, or complementarily, as you wish — a real and concrete principle, which is mechanistic determinism, and not a “void” that would make indeterminism perfectly redundant. In case of doubt, read Werner Heisenberg, Dialogues on Atomic Physics, trans. Wolfgang Strobl and Luís Pelayo, Madrid, BAC, 1975 (American ed., Physics and Beyond. Encounters and Conversations, New York, Harper & Row, 1971), incidentally one of the most beautiful books of the century. I will return to this topic later.↩

  30. The name “Tetrapharmakon,” which I shamefully omitted to explain in the first edition of this book, derives from the ultimate goal of this technique: to instill in the practitioner four basic convictions: 1st, one should not fear death; 2nd, it is easy to attain the good; 3rd, one should not fear the divinity; 4th, it is easy to endure suffering. It doesn’t take much intelligence to perceive that the decisive proposition is the third one — an exact inversion of the “timor domini principium sapientiæ.”↩

  31. We will see shortly the resemblance between the “Tetrapharmakon” and Neuro-Linguistic Programming, a resemblance that Pessanha mentioned in passing without giving it a name.↩

  32. See Kurt Levin, Principles of Topological Psychology, trans. Álvaro Cabral, São Paulo, Cultrix, 1973, p. 29 ss. — Isn’t it ironic that this technical term invented by a distinguished Jewish psychologist has become a Nazi slogan?↩

  33. Obviously, this does not mean in any hypothesis a reduction of self-awareness to the effect of an “introjection of social roles,” as some psychologists and social scientists pretend. Self-awareness is not born ready, but it is a strong predisposition, which initially manifests itself in the passive form of imitation and obedience — just as the ability to walk by oneself is initially exercised in the passive form of being led back and forth by adults' hands. In the development of self-awareness, imitation and introjection are merely the occasion and instrument of the manifestation of a preexisting capacity, never the producing causes of a creation ex nihilo. To claim that self-awareness is mere introjection of social roles is to return to the old Lockean legend of the tabula rasa.↩

  34. A fearsome sign of the intellectual downfall of modern man is that our science intends to base itself on a criterion of truth and objectivity that is merely a public code, a table of ready-made rules of more or less uniform and mechanical application, dispensing self-consciousness, responsibility, and sincerity as subjective adornments. It’s the objectification of truth. — The concept summarized above of self-consciousness as the foundation of morality, and morality as the foundation of cognitive objectivity — including in the sciences —, was explained in more detail in my Ethics course (Casa de Cultura Laura Alvim, Rio de Janeiro, August-October 1994), whose corrected transcriptions will form a volume to be published under the title On the Foundations of Morality.↩

  35. See Konrad Lorenz, The Demolition of Man.↩

  36. On the same day, I saw on TV the gay leader Luiz Mott appealing to a certain comedian from SBT to stop ridiculing the class of homosexuals with his grotesque parodies, and immediately afterwards a group of foppish guys from the group called The Rebel Novices, dressed in Carmelite habits and caricaturing in the most vile manner the Catholic nuns. The comparison highlights the value scale that sometimes (not always, I hope) inspires gay activism, where the desire for a certain type of physical pleasure ends up becoming, at least implicitly, more respectable than religious devotion. This scale is incomparable with any ethical principles table ever known in this world: adherence to it makes a subject inaccessible to rational argumentation, removes him from civilizational debate, makes him an axiological UFO, foreign to the common feelings of the human species. Lorenz was right.↩

  37. See Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Snapping: America’s Epidemic of Sudden Personality Changes, New York, Lippincott, 1989.↩

  38. See Joost A. M. Merloo, Brainwashing. Mentacide: The Kidnapping of the Spirit, translated by Eugênia Moraes Andrade and Raul de Moraes, São Paulo, Ibrasa, 1980, and Olivier Reboul, Indoctrination, translated by Heitor Ferreira da Costa, São Paulo, Cia. Ed. Nacional, 1980.↩

  39. See Karl Mannheim, “Nazi Group Strategy”, in Diagnosis of Our Time, translated by Octávio Alves Velho, Rio, Zahar, 1961.↩

  40. See Paul M. A. Linebarger, Psychological Warfare, translated by Octávio Alves Velho, Rio de Janeiro, Biblioteca do Exército, 1962.↩

  41. See Robert L. Geiser, Behavior Modification and Controlled Society, translated by Áurea Weissenberg, Rio de Janeiro, Zahar, 1977.↩

  42. This is especially the case with Michel Foucault, anti-psychiatry, and the duo Deleuze-Guattari.↩

  43. Jean-Charles Pichon, Universal History of Sects and Secret Societies, trans. Baldomero Porta, Barcelona, Bruguera, 1971, vol. I, p. 525.↩

  44. Statement to Luís Carlos Lisboa, Jornal da Tarde, São Paulo, June 20, 1995.↩

  45. Diogenes Laertius, X, §6.↩

  46. Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus, 78-80.↩

  47. Cit. in Ch. Perelman et L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, Traité de l’Argumentation. La Nouvelle Rhétorique, Brussels, Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1970, p. 276.↩

  48. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1986.↩

  49. Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, “The Awesome Power of the Mind-Probers”, Science Digest, May 1983.↩

  50. Marielza Augelli, “Hypnosis is a new weapon used in robbery in Italy,” O Estado de São Paulo, December 9, 1990. Some significant paragraphs:

    Since May, Italians have been fighting against an unusual type of crime, which began in Piemonte, in the north of the Peninsula, and has already reached Sardinia and Sicily: robbery by hypnosis. In this new modality of assault, the victim hands over all his money with a smile on his lips and a confused mind. ‘It is a true gang, with about ten to twenty people in action,’ explains inspector Paolo Brun, from the Police Central in Turin, the most affected city. According to Brun, more than a hundred cases have already been registered. A disconcerting testimony was made by the cashier of the Monte Dei Paschi bank, from Potenza, who swore he did not understand how two Indians with deep black eyes, soft speech, and a lot of delicacy managed to take $1.8 thousand. ‘They came asking to exchange two $50 bills and, when I started to exchange the money, they asked only for bills that were from the x series. That upset me, I was sad because I could not find the notes and then I do not remember anything else’. ‘I don’t know how, I couldn’t stop giving out all the 100 thousand bills,’ said a supermarket owner in Turin. Brun managed to arrest three Pakistani suspects with fake passports, however he was forced to release them due to ‘lack of evidence’. According to him, the hundred complaints made throughout Italy are just the tip of an iceberg, because many cases are not reported, due to the fear that the victims have of looking like fools.↩

  51. See William Sargant, The Battle for the Mind, London, Heinemann, 1957, and Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, trad. Klaus Scheel, Rio de Janeiro, Imago, 1975.↩

  52. Sargant, Anatomy of an Epidemic, p. 47.↩

  53. Leon Festinger, Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, trad. Eduardo Almeida, Rio de Janeiro, Zahar, 1975 (original: A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Stanford, California, University Press, 1957).↩

  54. See IBM, A Handbook of Artificial Intelligence.↩

  55. See Conway & Siegelman, Snapping.↩

  56. Let no smart aleck mention the koans of Buddhism, apophatic theology, or other such examples as evidence that religious thinking admits self-contradiction. These examples only show that in the mystical sphere the understanding of certain truths requires an intuitive grasp capable of overcoming, in a leap, obstacles that to discursive reasoning seem insurmountable. Once the solution is found, it is perfectly logical, given the distinctions of planes of reality that logic, by itself, obviously could not carry out.↩

  57. “Discernment of spirits” is the science or technique practiced by all mystics of the great religions, which teaches a person to discern the source—and therefore the value—of their inspirations and inner visions. In Islamic mysticism, for example, it is affirmed that visions can come from God, angels, the human heart, other human beings, and finally from djinns or subtle beings of nature, including demons. The very content of the images and the set of feelings that accompany them indicate the source. The traditional teachings on this matter are recorded in the hadith, or sayings of the Prophet (Mohammed, or Muhammad), and have been supplemented by the observations of mystics over the centuries. In the Christian West, this art was included until quite recently in the regular teachings of Mystical Theology transmitted in seminaries. If knowledge of this discipline had not disappeared, deeds like those of Thomas Green Morton, not to mention even cruder ones, would awaken no more curiosity than as phenomena of spiritual teratology, deserving of pity at best. For more information, see Albert Farges, Les Phénomènes Mistiques Distingués de leurs Contrafaçons Humaines et Diaboliques, Paris, Maison de la Bonne Presse, 1920.↩

  58. This is not an exaggeration. Many indigenous tribes have, among their traditions, an authentic science of “discernment of spirits” that places them spiritually far above the average white man. See Joseph Epes Brown, The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indian, Pendle Hill, 1964, for more information.↩

  59. Charles Morgan, Liberties of the Mind, New York, Macmillan, 1951, pp. 10, 40, and 53-54.↩

  60. Carlos García Gual, Epicurus, Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 1981, reed. 1985.↩

  61. Ingemar Düring, Aristotle. Exposición y Interpretación de su Pensamiento, trad. Bernabé Navarro, México, Universidad Nacional Autónoma, 1990, p. 42.↩

  62. Düring, op. cit., p. 41.↩

  63. V. Pierre Aubenque, Aristote et le Lycée, in Brice Parain (org.), Histoire de la Philosophie, Paris, Gallimard, 1969 (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), t. I, pp. 685-687, and also the course notes of my course Pensamento e Atualidade de Aristóteles (Rio de Janeiro, IAL, 1994), fasc. I-III.↩

  64. See Werner Heisenberg, op. cit., Cap. I. – It is true that Heisenberg’s indeterminism can be used against philosophical realism (a doctrine that, absorbed by the Church through its Thomistic version, ended up being incorporated into dogma), but this does not in any way place it against spiritualism in general. Furthermore, Heisenberg’s arguments are not as serious as the layman imagines. The formula of the “uncertainty principle” is ∆x.∆mv ≥ ħ/2. It means that the margin of error in measuring the position x of an electron, multiplied by the margin of error in measuring its momentum (mass, m, times velocity, v) is never less than ħ/2, that is, the reduced Planck constant divided by 2). It is indeed an ambiguous statement, as it does not make clear whether the margin of error affects only the velocity, v, or also the mass, m. In the first case, the uncertainty principle would only express an operational obstacle; in the second, an inaccuracy inherent to the very nature of physical reality. Many supporters of indeterminism simply presupposed this latter alternative, before even having come to perceive the ambiguity, which was only shown to them decades later by the opponents of the theory. In other words: a flaw in physical science may have been projected without more ado onto the structure of the real. This and other terrifying blunders are mercilessly shown by Stanley L. Jaki in “Determinism and Reality”, The Great Ideas Today 1990, Chicago, Encyclopædia Britannica.↩

  65. However, it is a common place among intellectuals with scarce philosophical knowledge to claim Heisenberg’s theories as arguments in favor of atheism, based on superficial readings. The most recent example is Paulo Francis, who in his memoir, Thirty Years Tonight (São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 1994, p. 52 – actually a second volume, continuation of The Affection that Ends, Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian Civilization, 1980), confesses to have reached the conclusion of the non-existence of God as a teenager, during a meditation on the tram, and, without ever returning to the subject, found later, accidentally, a confirmation in Heisenberg’s arguments. Francis – an author who under other aspects is worthy of the greatest admiration – is not the first Brazilian intellectual I see admitting without embarrassment, and even with some vanity, the fortuitous origin and the frivolous nature of his opinions on serious matters; and who, in doing so, commits a second frivolity, setting a bad example for readers, especially young ones. But in fact the example is harmless: the trend has caught on. – However, the strangest thing in cases of this nature is the haste with which many intellectuals conclude from physical indeterminism the non-existence of God, sweeping under the rug the fact that for two centuries the main argument in defense of this conclusion was precisely determinism. For Pierre Bayle, La Mettrie, Helvétius, d’Holbach and tutti quanti, there was no doubt: if the universe worked like a machine according to immutable laws of cause-and-effect, then God became a dispensable hypothesis (the most fierce of the determinists, Laplace, was the one who introduced the term agnostic into the lexicon of pedantic self-definitions). But what is really dispensable is the determinist hypothesis, as well as its opposite, since both can be used equally as “proofs” of what one wishes to prove per fas et per nefas. The history of militant atheism is a prodigious succession of tricks. This is because atheism, in general, is a choice of youth, prior to any rational consideration of the subject, and once made there is nothing left but to rationalize a posteriori through devices that will be more or less ingenious according to the aptitude and the personal demand for arguments. There is not a single famous case of a thinker who has come to atheism in maturity, through deep reflections and for relevant intellectual reasons. Moreover, all religious faith coexists, almost by definition, with doubts and crises, while militant atheism always has the typical blind rigidity of adolescent beliefs. Militant atheism is, by itself, a serious sign of intellectual immaturity.↩

  66. I quote from memory, there may be some inaccuracies.↩

  67. About the evasionism of intellectuals shortly after AI-5 and the emergence of nihilistic theories in the Brazilian scenario, see my book ‘The Collective Imbecile,’ chapter 8.↩

  68. As a principle, I never use the majestic plural. Therefore, wherever there is “we”, it must refer to both of us, reader, two nobodies, and not to some presumed collective subject, impersonal, genius for being transcendent to the imbecility of the single elements that compose it.↩

  69. The suppression of objective knowledge is not, in Marx, a declared objective, but an inevitable consequence of the Marxist concept of nature. Nature for Marx only exists as a scenario of history or as a soft and plastic material to be molded by human action. See, later, §17.↩

  70. See my books The New Age and the Cultural Revolution. Fritjof Capra & Antonio Gramsci, chap. II and III, and The Collective Imbecile: Current Brazilian Incultures, chap. 2-5.↩

  71. On the irrationalist contamination of Marxism in the course of its evolution (not at its root, as the one I’m talking about here), see José Guilherme Merquior, Western Marxism, translated by Raul de Sá Barbosa, Rio de Janeiro, Nova Fronteira, 1987, and also Allan Bloom, The Decline of Western Culture. From the University Crisis to the Society Crisis, Brazilian translation, São Paulo, Best Seller, 1989. Merquior shows that the romantic and irrational elements were strong in Lukács’s own thought. In the same sense, but with a positive emphasis, argues Michel Löwy, Romanticism and Messianism. Essays on Lukács and Benjamin, translated by Myrian Veras Baptista and Magdalena Pizante Baptista, São Paulo, Edusp/Perspectiva, 1990.↩

  72. V. Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station, and Paul Johnson, Intellectuals.↩

  73. “Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpreted_, es kommt darauf an sie zu verändern”_ — sentence from the manuscript reproduced in facsimile in The German Ideology, trans. S. Ryazanskaya, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1964. The verb verändern comes from the root ander = “other”, so the most exact translation would be “alter it”. But alteration, insofar as it ceases to be a simple property or an accident of the substance, is in fact a substitution; and, insofar as the real world cannot really be replaced by another, the substitution occurs only within the sphere of the collective imaginary, through a sudden mutation or rotation of the perceptual frame – a snapping, Conway and Siegelman would say. Hence the invulnerability of the convinced Marxist to rational argumentation. He not only thinks differently from the non-Marxist: he perceives the world under different categories, like the hysterical patient for whom imagining is feeling. See The New Age and the Cultural Revolution, Chap. III, item 3. But this also means that expressly renouncing Marxism is not the same as instantly freeing oneself from its influence, just as becoming aware of a neurosis is not the same as being cured. Marxisme pas mort: it survives as a complex in the subconscious of those who have rejected it without thoroughly criticizing it. In my essay “The moral superiority of the left, or: the tail and the dog”, reproduced in The Collective Imbecile, I outline a psychoanalysis of the residual Marxism of our intellectuals.↩

  74. Éric Weil, Logique de la Philosophie, Paris, Vrin, 2nd ed., 1967, “Introduction”.↩

  75. Subjugation, manipulation, and use of human beings (or animals) for erotic pleasure — this is the very definition of libertinism (Sade, Choderlos de Laclos et caterva), in which, however, some professionals of blindness, like Mr. Adauto Novaes — heir to the extinguished flame of Motta Pessanha — believe to see a liberating role. V. Adauto Novaes, "Why so much libertinism?", opening text of the symposium Libertines/Libertarians, Rio de Janeiro, Funarte, 1995 — an edifying example of how the pedantic worship of minor authors can coexist in the same brain with a profound ignorance of the History of Philosophy, as well as History tout court.↩

  76. See Olavo de Carvalho, From Loving Contemplation. Chapters of an Interior Autobiography (handout), Rio de Janeiro, IAL, 1995.↩

  77. The high rate of pedantic intellectuals and wealthy aesthetes in the ranks of the left — a universally known phenomenon — should therefore not be a mere coincidence, or much less a contradiction, but rather the perfect manifestation of the spirit of the thing: fighting for “a just society” is the ethical dilettantism of those who do not believe in any ethics except as arbitrary convention, ideological myth, or tactical expedient. Hence the vain inversion that, despising obedience to explicit moral values, praises almost like a saint the man who acts well according to an ethic in which he does not believe, affirming in practice what he denies in theory: the accidental and dilettante goodness of the immoralist seems wrapped in the charm of divine gratuity, denied to those who simply and humanly do what seems right to them according to a moral rule. Hence also the ease with which these people produce substitutes for “ethical” justification for the crimes and perversities committed for the sake of their “ideal”: for this has the aesthetic perfection of an arbitrary form conceived by the mind, and does not let itself be contaminated by the demands of moral self-consciousness, attentive to the game of pretexts and acts. On aestheticism as a source of modern political doctrines, see the masterful — and unjustly forgotten — essay by Otto Maria Carpeaux on Machiavelli in A Cinza do Purgatório, Rio, Casa do Estudante do Brasil, 1942; on aestheticism as the dominant ideology in the Brazilian literate classes, see the no less notable and no less forgotten book by Mário Vieira de Mello, Desenvolvimento e Cultura. O Problema do Esteticismo no Brasil, São Paulo, Nacional, 1958.↩

  78. Timaeus, 47c.↩

  79. On the purely contemplative sense of intellectual activity in the Middle Ages, see the very valuable thesis by Antônio Donato Paulo Rosa, A Educação segundo a Filosofia Perene, presented to the Faculty of Education of USP in 1993 (typed thesis). On the inability of the bourgeois — liberal and socialist — to understand this, see Kenneth Minogue, O Conceito de Universidade, translated by Jorge Eira Garcia Vieira, Brasília, UnB, 1981.↩

  80. If Marx had no difficulty rejecting Epicurus' ethics while retaining something of his physics, it was simply because, as shown in §8, the two have nothing to do with each other.↩

  81. An orientation faithfully maintained in the events of the same series O Olhar e Os Sentidos da Paixão held after Motta Pessanha’s death. In the last of these events, in July 1995, Mr. Adauto Novaes, the new entrepreneur of philosophy-as-spectacle, attempted to impose on the audience the conviction that the national indifference towards authors like La Mettrie, Sénancour, and Crébillon Fils (second-rate libertines) is an intolerable cultural backwardness (see Novaes, loc. cit.). In a country that has not even shown interest in translating the works of Leibniz and Aristotle (and only in 1995 had its first translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister), this is pure snobbery of a country bumpkin pretending to be Parisian.↩

  82. Anthony Robbins, Unlimited Power, translated by Marie-Hélène Dumas, Paris, Laffont, 1989, p. 59.↩

  83. Ibid., p. 58.↩

  84. For the relationship between pragmatism and Marxism, see The New Age and the Cultural Revolution, p. 80-82 and 113-117 of the 2nd edition, and especially The Collective Imbecile, chapters 3, 4, and 5. These are essential for a profound understanding of what will be read in the following pages.↩

  85. For a detailed explanation of this point, see Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, translated by Manuel García Morente and José Gaos, Madrid, Revista de Occidente, 1929 (reprinted by Alianza Editorial, 1982), vol. I, chapters 3-10. Husserl’s critique of psychologism is perhaps the most complete refutation of a theory that anyone has ever made since the beginning of the world.↩

  86. For those who understand the subject, it is unnecessary to say that sociologism in general, and the Marxist concept of ideology included therein, are nothing but special cases of psychologism as approached by Husserl.↩

  87. Note from my Philosophical Diary, under the title “Becoming and Meaning,” dated August 8, 1989: “The materialist interpretation of History may be true or false, but, regardless of this, it exerts an influence on History. Men who are convinced that the engine of history—and culture, and thought, etc.—is the class struggle, act differently from men who think that History reflects the will of God or the movements of spirit, or who simply understand History as a senseless agitation and seek meaning precisely in what is outside History and time. Men of this latter category, when they act in society, seek above all to ensure that as many people as possible have access to contemplation, to that which is outside and above History; and this is the sense that ethically justifies all their efforts, including those aimed at improving the material conditions of life for the populations, to free them from economic pressure and give them the opportunity to vacare Deo. On the other hand, believers in historical materialism are only interested in inserting an increasing number of men into the consciousness of the historical process, into voluntary participation in becoming. Now, becoming cannot be the meaning in itself; participation in becoming only makes sense in relation to some objective to be achieved. But with the promise of the supratemporal, of access to transcendence no longer there, active involvement in praxis is exhausted as an end in itself and falls to purely pretextual objectives, dedicated to keeping the wheel spinning. This is the true effect and true meaning of Marxism, beyond its declared intentions, whether they be deliberate lies or self-deceptions of sick mentalities. One would have to be a complete idiot to take as a redemptive promise the threat that these people make to imprison us forever in the circle of samsara. Some criticize Marxist utopia for being unrealizable. If it were realizable, it would be hell itself, in the etymological sense of falling to a lower ontological level.”↩

  88. “New Age as Perennial Philosophy,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 7th, 1988.↩

  89. Understanding the New Age, translated by João Marques Bentes, São Paulo, Bompastor, 1993. An extremely valuable book that, because it is published by a religious publisher, is ignored by the critics—who are servilely attentive, however, to publications on occultism and self-help.↩

  90. It is significant that, in sects like Moon’s and Rajneesh’s, one of the means used to break down the psychological resistance of disciples is precisely not to give them a single moment of privacy, subjecting them to constant surveillance and intrusion by companions and superiors—always, of course, in a kind and discreet manner, so that the victim does not perceive in it the sign of a manipulative intention. The psychological effects are devastating.↩

  91. The two represents the static opposition that, in the absence of the ternary synthesis, is provisionally resolved in mere quantitative multiplication. For example, the two terms of an unsolvable alternative are repeated indefinitely, as if skidding in false, until hallucination. The symbolism of numbers has nothing “esoteric”, in the pejorative sense of the word. It is a rigorous knowledge, endowed with apodictic logical foundations, whose effectiveness in the real world, moreover, is confirmed by the psychological investigation of the unconscious, outside of any metaphysical presupposition. Compare, in this regard, on the one hand the remarkable work of the Brazilian philosopher Mário Ferreira dos Santos, Pitágoras e o Tema do Número (Pythagoras and the Theme of the Number) (São Paulo, Matese, 1960), which focuses on numbers as logical (and ontological) categories, on the other hand the clinical observations of Dr. Ludwig Paneth in La Symbolique des Nombres dans l’Inconscient (The Symbolism of Numbers in the Unconscious), trans. Henriette Roguin, Paris, Payot, 1976.↩

  92. About the Chinese Triad, see the classic by René Guénon, La Grande Triade (The Great Triad), Paris, Gallimard, 1957 — a book after which whatever is said on the subject runs the serious risk of belaboring the obvious. However, descending from the metaphysical to the historical level, there is much to say, and Georges Dumézil said a lot about the relations between the religious ternary and the social order in Mythe et Épopée (Myth and Epic), 3 vols., Paris, Gallimard, 1968-1973.↩

  93. Orthographic note: instead of the spellings “muçulmano” and “Islã”, which the ineptitude of our grammatical legislators consecrated as correct, I prefer the forms “mussulmano” and “Islam”, which are almost transliterations, faithful to the triliteral root of both these words, slm (from where comes also saláam, “peace”). I do so also knowing that in the Islamic religion the spelling of words has a ritual use and a deep symbolic meaning – similar to Hebrew – that is completely lost in these arbitrary adaptations. I also do not use in Arabic transliterations, in this and other books, the international phonetic alphabet, which is very complex, but a simplified system of my own invention, where each Arabic letter corresponds to one and only one letter of the conventional Latin alphabet, modulated by accents. [Translator’s note: This footnote was kept as a curiosity, although obviously it is a moot point in English, where “Muslim” and “Islam” are the typical spellings.]↩

  94. I drew some consequences from this phenomenon for the theory of literature in “The literary genres: their metaphysical foundations”, in The symbolic dialectic: collected studies, op. cit., where you will also find more bibliographic indications on the subject. See above, n. 6.↩

  95. Mircea Eliade, Treatise on the History of Religions, trans. Natália Nunes and Fernando Tomaz, Lisbon, Cosmos, 1977, pp. 74-77.↩

  96. Oedipal guilt does not accompany every rejection of faith, but it is a typical phenomenon of Christian civilization. In Islam, where it is a dogma that God “neither begets nor was begotten” and calling Him “father” is an intolerable blasphemy, adherence to atheism does not bring a feeling of Oedipal guilt, but of traumatic severance of the umbilical cord and loss of sense of direction. The spatial orientation (qibla) and the sense of integration into the great human community (umma) immediately disperse like smoke in the ex-Muslim, who floats alone in an undefined space, like a motherless boy lost in the streets. It is a feeling of orphanhood, but fixed on the loss of the mother. Umma in fact has the same root as “mother”, omm. It is not unrelated to the fact that the founder of the Islamic religion was an orphan, first of mother, then of father. The imagery of figures floating in space, which appears insistently in Salman Rushdie, expresses this feeling, much more “primitive” than Oedipal guilt. Dr. Freud, who understood nothing of these things, speculated about universal religion generalizing his limited experience of the Jewish and Christian environment. Atheism is not a homogeneous phenomenon: there is one for each religion. I have been saying this for years, apparently without arousing the slightest interest from scholars. It is not the same to abandon Christianity or Buddhism, Islam or Judaism. The atheist of Jewish origin, for example, hardly fails to adhere, compensatorily, to some political utopianism, where he finds an Ersatz for the prophetic clamor for justice. After all, he did not abandon the “Father”, but the “Law”. If there is a Comparative Religion, it is also necessary a science of Comparative Atheism, without which it is impossible to orient oneself in the chaos of contemporary atheisms. The differences between the strategic visions of Karl Marx, Lenin and Gramsci, for example, can be greatly elucidated by the Jewish-Protestant origin of the first, Russian-Orthodox of the second, Catholic of the third. It is a pity that until today nobody has studied this in detail.↩

  97. From this would later derive the two great lines that dispute the primacy of Western thought: physical-mathematical naturalism and historical-culturalism. See, ahead, §20.↩

  98. Cf. Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics, Berkeley, Shambhala, 1975.↩

  99. Cf. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, trans. Octanny S. da Mota and Leônidas Hegenberg, Rio de Janeiro, Francisco Alves, 1977, especially chap. VII.↩

  100. Alexandre Koyré, Du Mond e Clos à l’Univers Infini, trans. Raïssa Tarr, Paris, Gallimard, 1973, p. 19-20 [original English from 1962].↩

  101. Koyré, loc. cit.↩

  102. About the mundus imaginalis, see Henry Corbin, Avicenne et le Récit Visionnaire, Paris, Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1954; English translation by Willard Trask, Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, Irving (Texas), University of Dallas, 1980.↩

  103. Koiyré, op. cit., p. 30.↩

  104. Koyré, op. cit., p. 64-65.↩

  105. Commenting on a more advanced stage of the process of mathematization of nature — Galilean physics —, Edmund Husserl writes: “As we observe, the Galilean idea is a hypothesis, and a hypothesis of a surprising kind. Surprising, because, notwithstanding the verification, the hypothesis remains a hypothesis, and it remains so forever; the verification (the only possible one) is an infinite sequence of verifications. This is precisely the essence of natural science, the a priori of its way of being” (Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, edited by Walter Biemel, trans. Enrico Filippini, Milan, Il Saggiatore, 4th ed., 1972, p. 71). Whoever meditates seriously on these words will understand that knowledge thus constituted has no qualifications to step out of the framework of strict methodological humility and to opine on issues of metaphysics, gnoseology or even cosmology.↩

  106. “That’s why it’s necessary to have learned what requirements should be brought to each type of science, as it’s absurd to seek simultaneously a science and the way to achieve that science; and neither of the two objects is easy to grasp. Notably, one should not demand mathematical rigor in everything, but only when dealing with immaterial beings. For this reason, the mathematical method is inapplicable to Physics. For all Nature probably contains matter; hence, we should first examine what Nature is, for thus we will equally see what Physics deals with” (Metaphysics, a, 3, 995a).↩

  107. On the exclusion of the mad, see Michel Foucault, Histoire de la Folie à l’Âge Classique, Paris, Plon, 1965.↩

  108. On the loss of the symbolic sense of nature, see Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Encounter of Man and Nature. The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man, London, Allen & Unwin, 1968 (there is a Brazilian translation, by Editora Zahar: Man and Nature).↩

  109. There is no intention here to depreciate the work of St. Alphonsus, an absolutely brilliant creation which philosophers show a truly pathological disinterest. I just say that it responds less to an intrinsic need of the Christian faith than to an extrinsic need imposed by the conditions of the era.↩

  110. On the progressive rise of irrationalist, sentimental, and romantic doctrines in the religious domain, see The Crisis of the Modern World, by Fr. Leonel Franca, S.J. (4th ed., Rio de Janeiro, Agir, 1955), one of the great Brazilian books that no Brazilian reads anymore — oh ungrateful country!↩

  111. See In the Shadows of Tomorrow, ch. XVI.↩

  112. See Raymond Ruyer, La Gnose de Princeton. Des Savants à la Recherche d’une Réligion, Paris, Fayard, 2nd ed., 1977. When the first edition came out in 1974, I praised the Princeton boys in Planeta magazine, and in response I received a discreet reprimand from Octávio de Faria, through the pages of Última Hora in Rio de Janeiro. I now repent before the great novelist: he was right. My article was quite correct in diagnosing the formation of a new priestly caste composed of scientists, but not in celebrating this event. The speculations of Princeton, I see now, were just a gigantic effort of spiritual pedantry to escape, through the Gnostic shortcut, from the “God hypothesis,” as Octávio de Faria had noted.↩

  113. Cited in John Brockmann, Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein, and Frankenstein. Reinventing the Universe, trans. Valter Pontes, São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 1988. Brockmann, a successful science writer, acknowledges that physicists nowadays “no longer know what they are talking about,” but finds this divine-marvelous.↩

  114. See Einstein and Infeld, The Evolution of Physics, ch. I.↩

  115. Professor Fernando Raul de Assis Neto, from the Federal University of Pernambuco, is discontented that someone would dare to dispute in only three pages Cantor’s argument against Euclid’s 5th principle. He expresses his indignation in the Minerva newspaper and promises to present his reasons in a more detailed article, to be published at an uncertain date and unmentioned location. I’m grateful that someone in the academic world would propose discussing the substance of my arguments instead of merely expressing discomfort at my presence on the planet. I eagerly await this exposition to understand where I misunderstood, as the professor believes, the abyssal depths of Cantor’s argument. From the brief sample, I doubt he can bring anything new. Professor Assis Neto declares, in fact, that my premises “are on a metaphysical plane” and that I mix them “improperly, with mathematical arguments that are on another plane”. The allegation is absurd. Firstly, it’s based on the premise that there can exist a mathematical field outside the domains covered by metaphysics, and this premise, of immense pretension and strangeness, would have to be proven. Instead of this, Professor Assis innocently takes it as obvious and self-evident to base on it the accusation that my metaphysical argumentation invaded a foreign domain. To my knowledge, metaphysics, the science of universal possibility, has no limits, and even pure mathematical formalism, when exploring merely imaginary possibilities, does not escape the realm of the imaginable and conceivable, which is as metaphysical as anything else. Secondly, Cantor’s argument about the “two infinities”, when presenting itself as a valid refutation of Euclid’s 5th principle – the whole is greater than the part – which is obviously metaphysical as it claims not only to imagine a possible space but to describe a property of real space, enters the metaphysical domain. Therefore, either Cantor’s argument has a metaphysical scope, and can therefore be contested on the metaphysical plane, or it is not a metaphysical argument and is not valid against Euclid’s 5th principle (nor indeed against anything at all). Tertium non datur. I perfectly understand Professor Assis' indignation, but I note that he has already had two opportunities to present his arguments and has evaded doing so. Firstly, during the course Aristotle in a New Perspective, given at UFPE, after presenting my refutation of Cantor I incessantly invited anyone who had objections to state them aloud, and the professor said nothing. The very article in Minerva was a second missed opportunity: instead of presenting his objections, the professor merely prophesied them in a vaguely threatening tone, as if a challenge for a duel was worth anything without precise indication of date and location. Therefore, either the arguments he has to present did not fit in the newspaper because they are of extreme technical complexity – which shows that my humble three pages have enough substance to feed long refutation efforts, so the professor’s surprise at the brevity of my exposition is therefore unwarranted – or the professor does not, in fact, have any argument at all, and has lost nights of sleep searching for one.↩

  116. P. 83 of the Os Pensadores edition (São Paulo, Ed. Abril, various reprints).↩

  117. Edmund Husserl, Formal Logic and Transcendental Logic. Essay on a Critique of Logical Reason, translated by Suzanne Bachelard, Paris, P.U.F., 1957, pp. 7-8.↩

  118. Friedrich Meinecke, Historicism and its Genesis, translated by José Mingarro y San Martín and Tomás Muñoz Molina, Mexico, FCE, 1943 (original German from 1936), p. 27.↩

  119. It is for this reason that I cannot entirely agree with the distinguished Friedrich Meinecke when he emphasizes, in a somewhat one-sided manner, the weight of Neoplatonic influence in the origins of historicism. While the idea of the universe as a living totality may have come from Neoplatonism, the emphasis on human drama as the center of cosmic reality is undoubtedly rooted in Christianity. On the other hand, it is entirely unfair to ignore that the turn towards concrete individualities, against rationalistic abstraction, was a return to the best and most genuine aspects of Aristotle, against the Platonism of the new physics. For Aristotle, after all, the only truly existing reality is substance, meaning in essence the concrete individuality – this man, this tree – whose generic concept is only a secondary and derivative reality, a “verum secundum quid,” true only in a certain aspect. As I have stated in other works (see “An Aristotelian Philosophy of Culture: Introduction to the Theory of the Four Discourses,” Rio de Janeiro, IAL & Stella Caymmi, 1994, and especially “Thought and Present-Day of Aristotle,” edited in booklets by IAL), it is only a gross simplification typical of almanac culture that can sustain the myth that modern thought is a rupture with Aristotelianism. Modern philosophy has only abandoned some parts of Physics from Aristotelianism, while reevaluating its methodology, metaphysics, theory of language, and especially its “Poetics,” entirely unknown in the Middle Ages.↩

  120. It is worth noting the uniqueness of this event. With the exception of ancient China, a society ruled by an elite of literate bureaucrats for whom a grammatical error could cost their lives, no other civilization had ever been overly concerned with dating ancient documents or matters of authorship. In both the East and the West, writings produced by disciples centuries after the death of a philosopher circulated under the name of the original author, and no one found this abnormal, partly due to indifference to the course of History and partly due to an anti-individualistic mentality that did not attribute the discovery of truth to a particular individual and preferred to forget the authors of falsehoods. Thus was the Western Middle Ages—a world where a certain disorganization was considered a sine qua non condition for the preservation of freedom: "Queste cose hanno bisogno di un po' di confusione." (These things need a bit of confusion.)↩

  121. The Marxists yielded so much to the arguments of their adversaries that the main Marxist historian of post-war Britain, E. P. Thompson, even admitted that the very concept of “class” — the key idea of the materialistic-dialectical interpretation of History — is not strictly an economic concept but rather cultural and psychological. Unintentionally, Thompson imploded Marxism with this admission. See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Penguin Books, 1968 (1st ed., 1963).↩

  122. Unfortunately, this vast opening of the human horizon was neutralized by ideological perversion. Enlisted in the leftist contestation against Western civilization, the anthropological understanding of ancient and indigenous cultures became a cliché designed to reinforce a new and more virulent “progressive” discourse. This discourse became self-contradictory and sometimes deranged, for instance, when it aimed to preserve indigenous cultures from any “deculturizing” contact with Western customs, correctly arguing that adaptation to new ways of life would destroy the cohesion of these communities and dismantle the personalities of their members. At the same time, however, it sought to impose drastic and abrupt changes on conservative and religious populations in the Western world. This, in turn, led to the rupture of social loyalty and the demolition of personalities, resulting in a wave of violence, madness, and crime, which, instead of taking responsibility for, the discourse blames “the system.” It learned from the devil, alternating between tempting and accusing.↩

  123. Bertrand de Jouvenel, Le Pouvoir. Histoire Naturelle de sa Croissance, Paris, Hachette, 1972, pp. 91-93.↩

  124. This also happens with Gurdjieff, whose similarities with Hegel go far beyond mere coincidence. The metaphysics of the former and the cosmology of the latter would make a beautiful chapter of comparative intellectual teratology, a thousand times more exciting than my poor Fritjof Capra & Antonio Gramsci. But this comparison will not be made, because Gurdjieff initiates and academic philosophers (among whom Hegel’s admirers) feel too much mutual contempt to be able to admit the hypothesis of leveling their respective gurus on the scales; and I have more to do. — However, it is true that at least the very lucid Eric Voegelin pointed out the character of “black magic” in Hegel’s writings, in a study reproduced in vol. 12 of his Complete Works published by the University of Louisiana.↩

  125. Philosophical Propaedeutics, I.1.I.A.a, § 16.↩

  126. Needless to say, once this trick is dismantled, all of Hegelian metaphysics comes down, showing itself to be just, in the end, the magnified projection of phenomena immanent to the human psyche. The idea that being, in itself, is really nothing simply because we have not yet filled its concept with content in our minds is indeed the absolute foundation of Hegel’s system and the initial objection from which he starts to mount his challenge to Schelling. It shows how much this system and this contestation are worth, behind all the dialectical flourish. I tell you the truth, children: Schelling was very great, et tenebræ non comprehenderunt eum (I explain this in more detail in my Essential History of Philosophy).↩

  127. See, in this regard, the notable work by Jacques D’Hondt, Hegel Secret. Research on the Hidden Sources of Hegel’s Thought, Paris, P.U.F., 1968.↩

  128. In this as in many other points of his philosophy, Hegel is staggeringly ambiguous. On the one hand, he applauds the Protestant Reformation as the culmination of the Christian process of liberating individual conscience. On the other hand, he reduces religion to the concept of “morality” – believing that whatever metaphysics there might be in religion had already been completely absorbed and surpassed by academic philosophy (makes me laugh!) – and, by making the State the guardian of morality, he ends up leaving individual consciences at the mercy of the State (Philosophy of Law, §268). Nietzsche, as sharp as ever, quickly noticed the trick: the Hegelian State was the “New Idol” that offered itself as a substitute to the tired combatants who had defeated the “old God”.↩

  129. It is clear that the so-called “Hegelian left” went much further. In David F. Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1835) the divinization of space-time is explicit, and Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity, 1841), raising the State to the category of “Man’s Providence”, gives the formula that would become almost a dogma of the 20th century: “Politics must become the new religion”. But such bravado should not impress us: these sub-philosophers would be powerless without the weapons they received from the master. Hegel is the supreme pontiff of the modern State: they are rather the court jesters, who loudly declare the inconveniences that the high priest, agreeing with them inwardly, prudently silences.↩

  130. Arthur Koestler, The Yogi and the Commisar and Other Essays, London, Jonathan Cape, 1945 (various reissues).↩

  131. Having exhorted the faithful to obey worldly authorities (Rm 13,1-7), the Apostle, however, warns: “Dare any of you, having a dispute with another, go to law before the unjust, and not before the saints?” (1Cor 6, 1). The meaning is clear: “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s”, but without submitting to his judgment on matters of conscience. With this, St. Paul had already preemptively refuted the Hegelian fallacy that “the State is the reality of concrete freedom”, showing that the State can only be the place of abstract, formal freedom, which, curiously, would also be very clearly perceived by Karl Marx. It is astonishing that Hegel, having clearly perceived the contradiction of the medieval Church – at the same time a defender of freedom of conscience and an obstacle to its effective exercise (Fil. Hist., II: 1) –, did not realize that the same contradiction would become even more acute in the modern State.↩

  132. My book The Prophet of Peace: Studies on the Symbolic Interpretation of the Life of the Prophet Mohammed (Muhammad), still unpublished nine years after receiving an award from the government of Saudi Arabia, is a study on the significance of prophecy in History, illustrated by the case of the only prophet from whose acts and words abundant documentation has been left for the modern historian. This study convinced me, once and for all, that the phenomenon of prophecy is the pivot on which the portal of historical understanding revolves, and that a history reduced to the natural and civil dimensions, as is almost everything that today goes by the name of Herodotus’s science, is merely a provincial chronicle, without any power to elucidate decisive factors, cyclical returns, the rise and fall of empires and doctrines. That entire philosophies of History may have been established on such narrow foundations only shows that modern intellectualism is a new priesthood of the Greco-Roman type, firmly committed to not letting men see anything beyond the worldly circle. Antonio Gramsci’s advocacy of the “total mundanization and terrestriality of thought” (sic) is only the culmination of a process of narrowing the human intellectual horizon that has been going on for centuries. Its ideal is to reduce the historian’s consciousness to the condition of the frog from the fable, a well-dweller who, when asked about the sky, replied, “It’s a little hole in the roof of my house.”↩

  133. It is absolutely essential for anyone who wants to understand this period of history to read the classics of Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, New York, Image Books, 1957 (several reprints), and The Making of Europe. An Introduction to the History of European Unity, New York, Meridian Books, 1956.↩

  134. M. García-Pelayo, quoted in Antonio Truyol y Serra, Historia de la Filosofía del Derecho y del Estado, vol. I. From the Origins to the Late Middle Ages, 4th ed., Madrid, Revista de Occidente, 1970, p. 251.↩

  135. The term gnosis is sometimes used to name it, but this word also serves to designate — in a more generic way and without any connection to the Greco-Roman resistance to Christianity — the intellectual and cognitive element of any religious and spiritual tradition, including Christianity. In this sense, we speak of an Islamic, Buddhist gnosis, etc., and also of a Christian gnosis (for example, in Clement of Alexandria), which have absolutely nothing to do with the particular phenomenon I am studying here, which is why I prefer to designate it with the differential term gnosticism.↩

  136. See The New Age and the Cultural Revolution: Fritjof Capra & Antonio Gramsci, Campinas, VIDE Editorial, 4th ed., p. 13-16.↩

  137. The most intelligent study ever written on the influence of Gnosticism in the history of Western ideologies is the work of Eric Voegelin cited later in note 247. The thesis defended in this paragraph is largely inspired by Voegelin, from whom, however, I separate some minor differences, which will manifest in the following paragraphs.↩

  138. René Guénon, Aperçus sur l’Ésoterisme Chrétien, Paris, Éditions Traditionnelles, 2nd ed., 1977, p. 8-26.↩

  139. On this paradox in the history of the Aristotelian influence and this antagonism in the heart of the Renaissance, see Aristotle in a new perspective: introduction to the Theory of the Four Discourses, op. cit., and also Thought and Current Significance of Aristotle, transcription by Heloísa Madeira, João Augusto Madeira and Kátia Torres, 12 issues, 5 already in circulation (Rio de Janeiro, IAL, 1994).↩

  140. See The New Age and the Cultural Revolution, Chapter I.↩

  141. Comte paid no attention to the fact that the aforementioned conquests, consisting essentially of compulsory military service, a tax burden higher than anything the monarchy dared to dream of, and the creation of the largest administrative and police bureaucracy the world had ever known, were not exactly designed to alleviate anything.↩

  142. On the notion of “qualified time”, see the excellent work of Michel Veber, Comments on René Guénon’s “Oriental Metaphysics”, introd. and notes by Olavo de Carvalho, São Paulo, Speculum, 1983, as well as — with reservations — Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, Paris, Gallimard, 1979.↩

  143. Anticipating frivolous objections that our semi-literate academics will not fail to present, I clarify that I am not thereby inventing a “theory of History,” which would replace the concept of “Empire” with Comte’s “three states”, class struggle, geographic determinism and other forces to which theorists have assigned the role of “motors” of historical happenings. The dominance of the idea of Empire is not a theory: it is a fact, and a specific fact of the History of the West. If it were a theory, it would claim to have a generic reach, an explanatory power over the historical process in general. But nothing similar to this typically Western fact is observed in the East, where the outbreak of an imperialist surge is rather an exception than a rule. Consider, for example, the case of China, powerful yet accommodated within its borders for millennia, only falling into the imperialist temptation when contaminated by Western ideas. Consider the Islamic world, perpetually divided into hostile nations and only rarely having some initiative of imperial unification, a fleeting and unsuccessful itch. No, gentlemen: imperialism is not a so-called “historical law”: it is a fact that occurred in a certain part of the world. It cannot be refuted through theoretical arguments; it has to be discussed in the field of historical narration, which only confirms it.↩

  144. Cf. Funck-Hemmer, Histoire de l’Église, Paris, Armand Colin, 1891, t. I, p. 359 ss.↩

  145. The term translatio imperii is normally used to designate the transfer of the Empire from Rome to Byzantium. Here I use it in a broad sense, to designate all changes of the axis of imperial power in the West.↩

  146. A commitment that, it’s true, only fully obliged the upper ranks of the clergy, with married priests being abundant, at least until the year 1000 — a small fry, however, which could not have a voice in a case like the one I am discussing here. Cf. Funck-Hemmer, op. cit., passim.↩

  147. The Revolution will only change the form of this drama, without resolving it. This change, as we will see later, is the essence of the so-called “modernity”.↩

  148. On the economic organization of the Roman Empire and the causes of its dissolution, Max Weber’s classic essay remains unsurpassed. A translation – “La decadencia de la cultura antigua. Sus causas sociales” – was published in the Revista de Occidente (Madrid), vol. XIII, no. 37, Jul. 1926. I don’t know if there is another one.↩

  149. Edouard Perroy, The Middle Ages. The Expansion of the East and the Birth of Western Civilization, in Maurice Crouzet (ed.), General History of Civilizations, trans. Pedro Moacyr Campos, São Paulo, Difel, 1956, vol. III, vol. 1, p. 126.↩

  150. Boniface did not pull this statement ready and finished from his own brain: it had already been germinating in many illustrious heads who, observing since the 10th century the insubordination and arrogance of the warrior caste, demanded disciplinary measures that only came, through Boniface, when it was late and the Church was already too weakened. Pope Innocent IV (1243-54) had already affirmed that the Church enjoys the fullness of the Imperium, a thesis that became very widespread among the canonists. What Boniface did new was simply to transpose this thesis from the theoretical sphere to that of practical commands, unleashing an earthquake.↩

  151. “The Pope clearly did not expect the opposition he was going to raise. His entire conduct proves that he had not understood the changes that had emerged in Europe… He failed to see that the rights of the crown were supported by the consent of the people… What made (the kings) triumph was their awareness that they had the consent of their peoples, that is, moral strength, which is the only one that allows one to win a conflict of this nature” (Henri Pirenne, History of Europe, trans. Juan J. Domenchina, Mexico, FCE, 2nd ed., 1956, p. 270). This paragraph combines a masterpiece of historical analysis with the deformity of a moral evaluation marked by the typical incapacity of the modern academic, even a Christian, to understand the nature of Christianity. In the first place, even knowing about the popularity of kings, how could the Pope admit that the “consent of the people” was the generator of spiritual authority, if at the very origin of Christianity was the fact of a martyrdom perpetrated with massive collective consent? In the second place, why call “moral force” the mere feeling of security that comes from the certainty of collective support, when the supreme model of moral strength, which supports the entire ethical pedagogy of our civilization, is precisely that of Christ, the lone defender of the truth that everyone denies? Should Boniface, to follow the spirit of the age, renounce the spirit of his faith? No: he had legitimate moral strength—he preferred the dignity of defeat to an abject compromise. Above all, if a Pope is a man of religion and not just a politician, it makes no sense to judge him only by the canons of the reason of State, where the only obligation is to win. Pirenne, no doubt, sees Boniface through the eyes of Philip, and refuses to attempt the reverse operation.↩

  152. Although, of course, he had no suspicion that he was fighting the seed of a new imperial power (the empire was in Germany, and it was already a lot of trouble), but merely a rebellious national monarchy.↩

  153. Transcribed in the appendix to the “Introduction” by Luís A. De Boni, from: Egídio Romano, On Ecclesiastical Power, trans. Cléa Pitt B. Goldman Vel Lejbman and Luís A. De Boni, Petrópolis, Vozes, 1989, p. 27.↩

  154. Dante Alighieri himself came to defend monarchical autonomy, in the treatise De monarchia. Afterwards, perhaps regretting it, he filled Hell with kings.↩

  155. Cited in Jean Favier, Philippe le Bel, Paris, Fayard, 1978, p. 6.↩

  156. Ancient traditions and mythologies are full of stories of magicians, priests, and prophets who name kings and then suffer the greatest ingratitude from their protegés. This seems to be a constant in human history. According to René Guénon, it is indeed (see Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power, Paris, Éditions Traditionelles, 1948). It’s interesting that the dispute over spiritual priority between the priestly and royal castes is reproduced, on the discrete scale that suits the case, between the two greatest esoteric writers of the 20th century: René Guénon and Julius Evola (of the latter, see especially The Mystery of the Grail, trans. António Carlos Carvalho, Lisbon, Vega, 1978). When transferred from the political arena to the esoteric sphere, this debate seems to become the occupation of nostalgic scholars, but in fact it is here that it becomes decisive for understanding the direction of contemporary history. As Guénon said, power is secret by nature, and so are the causes: the struggle for the spiritual scepter of the world becomes radical and more decisive precisely at the time when “public opinion,” deceived by tons of irrelevant information, is looking in a completely different direction. If the reader has followed my argument so far, they must certainly understand the immense weight that the dispute between men of religion and men of government will have in deciding the fate of the world. Ironically, the public opinion, including the literate one, has no idea that this is the old caste conflict, especially because the official doctrine of the Revolution taught them to believe that castes are a conventional institution, revocable by decree — which certainly didn’t make castes cease to exist, but only made them invisible and gave their war the proportions of a natural catastrophe.↩

  157. The mystique of this phrase lasted until the 20th century. Maurice Barrès, Jacques Maritain, Charles Péguy, and Georges Bernanos believed in it devoutly. These two, writing about it, bring tears; Maritain, yawns, and Barrès, a bit of vomit, at least mine. Gen. de Gaulle proved that it worked in practice, it moved the world. Even the atheist Mitterrand seems to be a devotee of it.↩

  158. Think, for example, of today’s alternative, between the compressive discipline of the ayatollahs and the nullification of individual consciousness in the administered society of the West…↩

  159. Hence the emergence of the messianic spirit, which will mark Russian-Orthodox mentality until at least the end of the 19th century, long after the mythology of national Christianity has died out in Western countries. Men like F. Dostoevsky and V. Soloviev still fervently believed in Russia’s Christianizing mission in the world. Joseph Conrad, a Pole whose family had suffered in the flesh the effects of imperial catechesis, summed up in one word the spirit of this living anachronism: “Cynicism”.↩

  160. The bloody phase of the Inquisition dates from this time and place. In contrast to the medieval Inquisition, which only used violence against heretics in case of armed rebellion, the new phase will inaugurate the persecution of isolated individuals.↩

  161. Louis Bertrand, Louis XIV, 161 Paris, J. Tallandier, 1929, t. II, p. 156.↩

  162. Id., p. 161.↩

  163. Innocent III, in a bull whose title does not occur to me, had explicitly used this image, consecrating it as an officialized expression of the doctrine. – By the way, the same Innocent III, establishing too rigid a demarcation line between sacred and profane sciences, contributed a lot to the emergence of modern lay and materialist intellectuality. The subject is studied by Gilbert Durand in Science de l’Homme et Tradition, Paris, Tête de Feuilles / Sirac, 1978.↩

  164. V. Bertrand de Jouvenel, Le Pouvoir. Histoire Naturelle de sa Croissance, Genève, 1945, nouv. éd., Paris, Hachette, 1972 – a classic, an absolutely essential reading.↩

  165. Here we suddenly understand another cause of the failure of the medieval Empire: in an insufficiently Christianized Europe, spiritual authority did not fully prevail; as a result, the clergy descended to the exercise of temporal power; and, at the same time that it sought to rid itself of it and transfer it to an Empire, it forced to retake it whenever the Empire escaped its control; and in this back and forth a thousand years passed. What I ask myself, without finding an answer, is: if the Church, without temporal power, had achieved such success during the first six centuries, why could it not simply continue Christianizing Europe, with all patience, letting Caesar take care of Caesar? The Empire aborted because it was born premature. Why generate it so early? Why not wait for the Christianization, slowly and naturally, to yield less bitter political fruits? I don’t know the answer, but one thing is certain: the Church did not get involved in political affairs on its own initiative, but was put into them by the course of events: fall of the Empire, need to improvise an administration, vacancy of old barbarian religious leaderships etc.; then it was divided between the need to pass the hot potato to the laity and the fear of a new religious persecution under the reign of a Caesar of its own creation. If Brazilians already existed at that time, they would see a premonitory sign in the fact that the first candidate for emperor was called… Pepin!↩

  166. About Sir John Fortescue, see Carl J. Friedrich_, Historical Perspective of Philosophy of Law_, trans. Álvaro Cabral, Rio, Zahar, 1965, Cap. IX, and Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, op. cit.↩

  167. About the persuasive methods of the terrible Albuquerque, see Elaine Sanceau, Afonso de Albuquerque. The Dream of India, trans. José Francisco dos Santos, Lisbon, Civilização, 3rd ed., 1953. The volume is part of a notable series that the author dedicated to the history of Portuguese discoveries.↩

  168. Quoted in Raymond Aron, Imperial Republic. The United States in the Post-War World, trans. Edilson Alkmin Cunha, Rio, Zahar, 1975, p. 21.↩

  169. This alone would be enough to shake the foundations of Hobson and Lenin’s theory about “imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism.”↩

  170. Manifest destiny: an expression used in 1845 by the editor John Louis O’Sullivan and that would become famous as a symbol of the expansionist spirit: “Our manifest destiny is to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions” (quoted in George B. Tindall and David E. Shi, America: A narrative History, 2nd. ed., New York, Norton, 1984, p. 333).↩

  171. Please, no one think that I am reasoning in the manner of Hegel. In my view, the terms of a real contradiction remain contradictory and are never perfectly absorbed into any synthesis, except metaphysically. The great historical creations are precisely attempts to reconcile, on the plane of contingent existence, demands that can only be reconciled in the metaphysical sphere, on the plane of universal Being. The resulting forms are always tense: their constitutive contradictions change shape, in successive adaptive arrangements — which precisely constitute their quantitative and temporal development —, until, once a certain line of possible adaptations is exhausted, the whole undergoes a global metamorphosis or dies (assuming that more powerful external causes do not kill it beforehand). This is the logical assumption that underlies the analyses I am making here: on the one hand, the distinction between real dialectic and ideal dialectic (a distinction that Hegel does not make); on the other hand, the recognition that, in the sphere of the real dialectic, there is no synthesis except potential, provisional, and therefore, tense (a recognition lacking in Marx). Therefore, if the Hegelian mixture of the ideal and the real is unacceptable, it is also naive to suppose that the mere inversion operated by Marx can fix things. After all, what Marx put in place of the Hegelian “concept” were not the facts, in their sometimes ungraspable complexity, but simply another abstract and overly simplifying concept, not to say simplistic: as much as you want to “materialize” it, the thesis-antithesis-synthesis scheme remains always a scheme; and, while it can function as a symbol or metaphor for certain metaphysical realities – which we must inevitably try to reach by symbols, since they escape the sphere of sensory experience –, it serves no purpose as a translation of the real movement of History, which it falsifies by metaphysically disappearing the “contingency” factor and transforming the uncertain and shifting succession of human acts into a regular scale of divine emanations, a substitute for the biblical Heptameron. Kolakowski hit the nail on the head by emphasizing the mystical origins of Hegel and Marx’s dialectic (v. Main Currents of Marxism, trans. Jorge Vigil, vol. I, Madrid, Alianza, 1976).↩

  172. It is clear that, in none of these cases, it is a question of a pure logical contradiction between concepts, but of real conflicts between factions, parties, families, classes etc. If I refer summarily to “contradictions of ideas”, it is only for the sake of brevity.↩

  173. Trans. Octavio de Faria and Adonias Filho, Rio, Brazilian Civilization, 1963.↩

  174. Example: only in the tenth year of the April 1964 coup, with the military regime already more than consolidated, did Freemasonry assume its participation in the authorship of the event, with the grand masters parading in aprons and towels next to the starred generals. Even more astonishing is when the entity, out of a mix of weakness and vanity, assumes as its own the feats that are, perhaps falsely, attributed to it by its adversaries: commenting on the book by Albert Lantoine, Histoire de la Franc-Maçonnerie Française: La Franc-Maçonnerie dans l’État (Paris, Émile Nourry, 1936), René Guénon praises it “lorsqu’il démolit la légende qui veut que la Maçonnerie ait joué un rôle considérable dans la préparation de la Révolution, car, chose curieuse, cette légende, qui doit as naissance à des écrivains antimaçonniques tels que l’abbé Barruel, a fini par être adoptée, beaucoup plus tard, par les Maçons eux-mêmes” (Études sur la Franc-Maçonnerie et le Compagnonnage, t. I, Paris, Éditions Traditionnelles, 1977, p. 106). Yes, for how could the entity be fully committed to the Revolution that had among its prominent members a Saint-Martin, a De Maistre?↩

  175. This is the characteristic thesis of Gustavo Barroso, Secret History of Brazil, 3 vols., Cia. Editora Nacional, 1937. I think there has never been in Brazil a researcher so well-informed about secret societies and yet so incapable, due to the lack of scientific method and philosophical spirit, of drawing solid conclusions from the information available to him.↩

  176. See John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy, Originally Published in 1798, With a New Introduction by the Publishers, Belmont, Mass., Western Islands, 1967. The author, a high dignitary of Scottish Masonry, addresses his peers to denounce the infiltration of members from another secret organization — the Bavarian Illuminati — into the ranks of the entity. — Later, the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini, having managed to rise to high positions in the hierarchy of the Illuminati, complained that there seemed to be, above the organization, another even more secretive one that manipulated it… The hide-and-seek games among secret societies anticipated all the practices that would be adopted by state secret services in the 20th century.↩

  177. See Mons. Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans, Study of Freemasonry, translated from the French, New York, Kenek Books, 1876.↩

  178. The Catholic polemic against René Guénon continues to impress with its incapacity to confront him on the properly metaphysical terrain. The famous objections of Mons. Daniélou regarding the symbolism of the cross show only an inferiority of IQ. Just like Daniélou, Paul Sérant, and other Catholic adversaries of Guénon, they flee to the theological and moral grounds, where they feel sheltered under presuppositions of faith that, however, are not metaphysically valid. The most ironic of all is that the Christian side is correct, but it does not know why. The key point of Guénon’s errors — which no one in this world seems to have seen to this day, not even his competitors from the Schuonian school — is purely metaphysical in nature: it lies in his doctrine of Non-Being and “possibilities of non-manifestation.” Once this intrinsically absurd doctrine is clarified and debunked, the true points of disagreement between Christianity and Guénonism, as well as their path to reconciliation, become manifest. I explain this more extensively in my Philosophical Diary.↩

  179. See Jean Palou, The Symbolic and Initiatic Frank-Masonry, translated by Edilson Alkmin Cunha, São Paulo, Pensamento, 1979, chapter I.↩

  180. Chistopher Lasch, when pointing out the increasing elitism in American society (in The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, trans. Talita M. Rodrigues, Rio de Janeiro, Ediouro, 1995), contrasts this phenomenon with the egalitarian ideology reigning in the last century, taking it as a radical novelty, without realizing that its roots are already in the cradle of the new Empire itself.↩

  181. In the sense in which I use these terms here, it is important to emphasize the distinction between concepts and mere nominal definitions. In the concept, I intentionally capture the essence of a real being (or a real attribute), understood as real (if not metaphysically, at least logically, that is, in hypothesis); in the nominal definition, only the intention signified by a word, regardless of the reality or unreality of the thing referred to. In symbolic logic, for example, only nominal definitions are used, but these are not enough for the theory of knowledge.↩

  182. V. a smart illustration of this point in: Nílson José Machado, “The allegory in mathematics”, Advanced Studies (USP), 5 (13), 1991, p. 79-100.↩

  183. On analogy, v. my essay “Symbolic dialectic”, in Astros and Symbols, São Paulo, Nova Stella, 1985, cap. II — fundamental to the understanding of the method of symbolic interpretation that I use in this and other studies; a method that owes a lot to René Guénon (Symbols of Sacred Science, Paris, Gallimard, 1962), Titus Burckhardt (Principles and Methods of Sacred Art, Paris, Dervy-Livres, 1960), René Alleau (Science of Symbols. Contribution to the Study of the Principles and Methods of General Symbolic, Paris, Payot, 1977), and Susanne K. Langer (Philosophy in a New Key. A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art, New York, Mentor Book, 1948, and Philosophical Essays, trans. Jamir Martins, São Paulo, Cultrix, 1971).↩

  184. The role of Freemasonry in the Revolution is quite ambiguous. On the one hand, all the revolutionary leaders belong to the organization; on the other hand, the king and all his entourage are also masons. Jean-Charles Pichon believes that, from the moment that Freemasonry introduced into its rites the symbolic killing of the “father of the architects,” Hiram, the builder of Solomon’s Temple, followed by his resurrection, it definitively assumed its revolutionary vocation, but neither the leading figures of the time, nor the majority of masons until today, have become aware of the most obvious implications of this ritual. I do not know what to think of this thesis, but it certainly deserves attention (See Historia Universal de las Sectas, op. cit., cap. XIII). The same ambiguity is noted in the role of Freemasonry during the formation of the Empire of Brazil. Pedro I is invited to join the organization, quickly elevated to the condition of Grand Master, and then boycotted by Freemasonry itself and led to abdication. See Octávio Tarquínio de Souza, A Vida de D. Pedro I (Rio de Janeiro, José Olympio, 1957), especially vol. II, chap. XIII and vol. III, chaps. XXIV and XXV.↩

  185. Without directly meddling in the government of this world: a crucial distinction, which the defenders of the “Masonic conspiracy” theory have never seen, eager as they were to denounce behind all events a Machiavellian Masonic finger.↩

  186. The same cannot be said of the characters involved. Allen Dulles, who was the director of the CIA for decades, very pertinently recognizes the abyssal scale difference that separates modern secret services from everything that until the 19th century was known as “espionage”. On one hand, “intelligence” services have far surpassed the field of military information to encompass the entire social and psychological life of nations, even penetrating into the intimacy of family customs, sexual life, etc. – overtly invading the so-called “private” sphere (see The Craft of the Spy, Portuguese translation. Lisbon, Guimarães, n.d.). On the other hand, they have grown to the point of becoming virtually uncontrollable. One of the most striking documents ever published on this subject (Journey into Madness. Medical Torture and the Mind Controllers, London, Corgi Books, 1988) tells the story of a training center for medical torturers created by the CIA; denounced in Congress, the center was closed, but the professionals trained there spread around the world, offering their services: Thomas found one of them in Lebanon, serving the terrorist organization that had kidnapped an American official and tortured him to extort information.↩

  187. That secret societies with originally initiatory and sacerdotal objectives later turn into bands of thieves, is a phenomenon that is not new in History. This was the origin of the Mafia, as well as the Chinese triads. What is unprecedented in world history (with the possible exception of the “Order of Assassins” in the Islamic East) is the extension of the power of these organizations and the fact that their main opponents are also secret organizations, these of a state nature.↩

  188. That Masonic or pro-Masonic intellectuals are the first to fight for materialistic and sociologizing interpretations of History, for the exclusion of all spiritual factors in historical explanation – exclusion that a fortiori leads to also omitting any specific interference of initiatory societies in the production of facts –, here is something that might tempt us to endorse the conspiracy theory, according to which these societies consciously direct the trajectory of the world through the skillful handling of the secret: imposing as “scientific” exclusively those interpretations that hide them, they would use hordes of skeptical and materialistic intellectuals as a protective wall to guarantee their invisibility, so as to be able to manipulate them with their own help. For my part, I see in this phenomenon rather an “ostrich effect”, in which esoteric entities end up becoming, themselves, unconscious of their action in the world. That Masonry assumes as its own certain actions that are imputed to it by its adversaries – see Guénon’s comment on Lantoine’s book, quoted in note 179 –, is an eloquent sign of lack of historical consciousness. After all, the manipulator, if he exists, is the most manipulated of all. There is a profound difference between influencing and directing. Between the conspiracy theory, according to which secret societies direct the course of History, and the “scientific” ideology that completely omits their influence (except when reduced to harmless “political forces” without specific weight), there must be room for a sensible middle ground that deserves, in its own right, the qualifier of scientific, temporarily usurped by the dogma of mandatory methodological blindness. This middle ground is precisely what I am looking for in these pages, being neither a Mason nor an anti-Mason.↩

  189. See Paul Johnson, The Intellectuals, Chapter II.↩

  190. See John Bennett, Witness. The Autobiography of John Bennet.↩

  191. See Axel’s Castle, New York, Scriber’s, 1931, Chapter I; Brazilian translation by José Paulo Paes, Axel’s Castle, São Paulo, Cultrix, 2nd ed., 1985.↩

  192. See Titus Burckhardt, Clé Spirituelle de l’Astrologie Musulmane d’après Mohyid-din Ibn-Arabi, Milano, Archè, 1978, Chapter III.↩

  193. See René Guénon, Le Théosophisme. Histoire d’une Pseudo-Réligion, Chapter I.↩

  194. Omar Ali and his brother Idries perhaps form the most famous duo of spiritual charlatans in England. Their unedifying story was published in the May 1955 issue of Encounter magazine.↩

  195. Robert Graves, His Life and Work, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1982, pp. 555-558.↩

  196. See Ernest Scott, The People of the Secret, London, Octagon Press, 1983.↩

  197. Both later filmed, the first with Therence Stamp and Samantha Eggar, the second with Anthony Quinn.↩

  198. See August Strindberg, Inferno.↩

  199. Example: Adam Schaff, repentant Marxist, mason, published in a Masonic magazine a historical analysis based on astrological methods; when it came time to publish the same study in a book (The Information Society. Social Consequences of the Second Industrial Revolution, trans. Carlos Eduardo Jordão Machado and Luiz Arturo Olojes, São Paulo, Brasiliense, 1995), he purged the text of all astrological and esoteric elements, to give his conclusions the appearance of having been obtained exclusively by “scientific” means.↩

  200. My personal investigations into the phenomenon of increasing secrecy are far from being entirely conclusive, as the reader can see from these pages. But it is not a matter of providing ready-made answers, but rather of protesting against the indifference to the questions. For, even if I have only partial answers and if these answers are still germinating in the womb of doubt, one thing, however, is absolutely certain: we cannot understand the course of contemporary history without asking these questions, no matter how long their answers may remain in the realm of conjecture or mere reasonable probability. On the other hand, the fact that we do not yet know in detail all the causal connections that lead from the origins of the process to its present state cannot prevent us from admitting that some connection must exist between the two things.↩

  201. See Paul Johnson, op. cit.↩

  202. And don’t forget, Brazilians, that when we expelled Pedro II the President of the USA, Theodore Roosevelt, commented that the only authentic republican leader of Latin America had fallen from government.↩

  203. V. ahead, notes 223 and 239.↩

  204. Cit. in Karl Marx, À propos de la Question Juive (Zur Judenfrage). Bilingual edition, trans. Marianna Simon, introd. François Châtelet, Paris, Aubier, 1971, p. 47-123, passim.↩

  205. Id., ibid.↩

  206. Is it really strange that a global movement capable of conquering a territory by force and founding a state in it did not have, a few years before, enough strength, foresight, or will to organize a massive withdrawal of Jews from Nazi Germany before the “final solution” began, which the more lucid Jews – philosopher Éric Weil, for example – predicted well in advance? Weil, in 1933, left Germany and, in protest against Nazism, abandoned the German language, choosing to write only in French (in splendid French, moreover). The father of a friend of mine also emigrated in the same year, amidst the laughter of relatives who criticized his “alarmism”: all, without exception, went to the gas chamber. These facts show that as early as 1933 – the year Hermann Rauschning’s prophetic warnings were published – the fate of the Jews was predictable, except for the leaders and important members of the community, imbued with a false sense of security inherent to success, wealth, and materialistic worldliness. That this topic has become taboo is easy to explain by the trauma of the Holocaust, whose horrifying memory prompts Jews to mourn rather than contemplate the past. But is it a sign of friendship to Jews to court a resentful pride that blinds them to the dangers that surround them today? For me, there is no doubt: the material glory that rewards Jews today does not compensate for the loss of their religious identity – a heritage they have a duty to preserve because it belongs not only to them but to all of humanity. Jews and Judaism have been the main victims, almost always unconscious, of the process of the mundanization of Western society – a process that many atheist leaders and intellectuals of Jewish origin have helped to accelerate. The old religious states persecuted and expelled Jews; they never exterminated them en masse nor sabotaged the practice of Judaism to the point of reducing the quota of practicing Orthodox to three percent of Jews. These facts, the proponents of the “Jewish conspiracy” theory do not see. But neither do Jews, in general.↩

  207. V. Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe, London, Hutchinson, 1976.↩

  208. I was revising these pages when a friend showed me, in the February 27, 1995 issue of Time magazine, a lucid letter signed by a Mr. Yaakov Wagner, of Downsview, Canada: “From the birth of their religion, the Jews have been persecuted, oppressed, victimized. Their tormentors have perished, great empires have fallen, and this tiny group has survived. From their ashes there has always come a ‘reawakening’; the Jews have always flourished and blossomed amid their ruins. Yet in the melting pot of the American culture, the chosen nation is rapidly disappearing. Finally given the opportunity to observe without harassment, the Jews deny themselves this right. When faced with Pharaoh and the Egyptian soldiers, the fires of the Spanish Inquisition, the war machines of Hitler and the Nazis, they refused to abdicate their faith. Will the Jews themselves now succeed in exterminating their own religion, accomplishing what generations of their persecutors have failed to do?” — The answer is: yes, as long as Jews do not free themselves from their false friends, the ideologues of modernity, and do not assume their role as a prophetic people. What role? That of helping to reconcile, not divide, the other religions that worship the same God. There will be no peace for the Jewish religion until there is peace among all religions, until they need an atheist state to police them.↩

  209. Show business artists who perform satanic rites in rock shows, on the grounds that they are mere enactments, fail to inform a credulous audience that every rite is an enactment; that enacting a rite – as long as it is complete – is the same as practicing it. Thus, they become “innocent” vehicles of psychic influences whose social effects are only harmless in the eyes of those who totally ignore what a rite is.↩

  210. One of the reasons why American historians and social scientists have never realized that Masonic elites – much more than the Catholic or Protestant clergy – have since Independence performed the function of a priestly caste lies in the fact that, as I have already pointed out, mere facts say nothing without the concepts that group them and give them meaning; and the current concept of “clergy,” on which these scholars generally relied, is too narrow to capture all the nuances and implications of what a priestly caste is. A “clergy” identifies itself with an established, “official” church, whereas a priestly caste, which may also eventually include a clergy, has an infinitely broader field of action, most of which has nothing to do with public functions, but with a type of more inner, subtler action, whether of a spiritual order, or a psychological one. The role of Masonic rites and disciplines in the structuring and inner balance of the founding and ruling elites of the U.S. cannot be denied, but it is not part of public religiosity. Examining their society with concepts drawn from other cultures and eras, scholars could not capture the specificity of the new framework, marked by the emergence – unprecedented in History – of an esoteric priestly caste without the corresponding exotericism. It is also necessary to consider the typical incomprehension of the average modern intellectual when it comes to the modus agendi of rites and spiritual disciplines. This results in a tendency to view Masonry only from the outside, as a political force in a material and direct sense, leading to a false assessment of the nature and scope of its influence. See also note 218 below.↩

  211. For the distinction between these two types of narratives, see "Symbols and myths in the film ‘The Silence of the Lambs’", in The symbolic dialectic: collected studies, op. cit., p. 200-205.↩

  212. Predominating not in quantity, but in quality: not in number of works, but in the value and significance of the works produced.↩

  213. Life of Don Quixote and Sancho, 15th ed., Madrid, Espasa-Calpe, 1971, p. 11-12.↩

  214. See the splendid preface by Marcel Brion to the French edition of Wilhelm Meister, trans. André Meyer, Paris, Bordas, 1949. On the notion of “Unknown Superiors” in Masonic symbolism, see René Guénon, “À propos des supérieurs inconnus et de l’astral” in Études sur la Franc-Maçonnerie et le Compagnonnage, Paris, Éditions Traditionnelles, 1978, vol II, p. 208-227.↩

  215. See Jacques Chailley, La Flûte Enchantée, Ópera Maçonnique, Paris, Robert Laffont, 1968.↩

  216. Vautrin, in Le Père Goriot, and Ferragus, in Histoire des Treize, for example, are characters whose power seemingly disproportionate with their personal qualities comes from the aid they receive from secret societies.↩

  217. Therefore, let it be clear: if on one hand I categorically reject any attempt to attribute to Masonry the authorship of modern evils, on the other hand it seems to me a fact that the rupture between Masonry and Catholic tradition is at the root of these evils – as indeed René Guénon himself claimed -, not exclusively, of course, but at least significantly.↩

  218. The fact that René Guénon, in the final stage of his life, moved to Egypt and adopted the Islamic way of life entirely, is interpreted by some scholars as a sign that he had lost all hope in a spiritual restoration of the West. This interpretation is plausible but lacks sufficient support in Guénon’s texts.↩

  219. The progressive ideology owes a lot to occultism, theosophy, and spiritualism in terms of the global acceptance of evolutionism, not as a simple biological theory but as a general explanation of the cosmos. But the collaboration between these two currents goes deeper than is generally imagined. A comprehensive study has not yet been made of the amalgamation of occultist, theosophical, spiritualist, and socialist ideas that have constituted for over a century the mental food of the literate and progressive circles, especially in Paris. The subsequent success of Marxism veiled the occultist origin of the socialist ideal. Important things about it were said by René Guénon in Le Théosophisme. Histoire d’une Pséudo-Réligion (1929, réed. Paris, Éditions Traditionnelles, 1978), especially chapter XXIX, and L’Érreur Spirite (2e. éd., Paris, Éditions Traditionnelles, 1952), especially Part I, chapter IV, and Part II, chapters I, IX, and XIII; Joseph Conrad’s novel, Under Western Eyes, gives an idea of the atmosphere reigning in the Russian socialist-occultist circles at the end of the last century, a subject that is deepened in Nicolai Berdiaev, Les Sources et le Sens du Communisme Russe (Paris, Gallimard, 1950). But, just to give an idea of the deep affinities that superficial differences conceal, I note that, in the New Age movement, the caricatural emphasis on the supposedly spiritual aspects of food — characteristic of Macrobiotics, for example — reflect less some Eastern idea than the maxim forged by the spokesperson of the Hegelian left, Ludwig Feuerbach: “Man is what he eats”.↩

  220. V. A Nova Era e a Revolução Cultural: Fritjof Capra & Antonio Gramsci, op. cit., p. 34-41.↩

  221. The present paragraph illustrates, in broad strokes, the method that I believe should be used in the study of the historical action of secret and initiatory societies, especially with regard to modern times: to focus on them not as political factions or groups of conspirators, but as shaping forces of the symbols in which the values and ideals of an era are projected – which is precisely the spiritual and priestly function par excellence. It is only in this function that they can be understood – and eventually judged.↩

  222. For example, Walter Scott attempted to ponder the relationship between Napoleon’s failure and the actions of secret societies. Regardless of our opinion on the results of his investigation, the fact remains that his monumental Life of Napoleon, in 8 volumes, did not deserve the reception it received: insults instead of critical arguments. Even the great Sainte-Beuve (who was a Freemason) preferred, in reviewing this book, assertive judgments and mere personal defamation elegantly interwoven with customary praises for the rest of the author’s work, which was already an established success not to be disregarded. See Premiers Lundis, in OEuvres, Paris, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1960, p. 248 ss.↩

  223. Some readers might challenge me for omitting Manzoni. However, I Promessi Sposi is more of a return to pre-Masonic aesthetics—with Renzo and Lucia’s marriage symbolizing the salvation of the soul—that remains distant from the problematic discussed here.↩

  224. Last verse of the second Faust: “The Eternal Feminine / leads us upward.”↩

  225. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Mário Ferreira dos Santos, São Paulo, Logos, 1954.↩

  226. If modern intellectualism has lost sight of the existence of castes (even becoming unable to perceive its own caste condition), it was for having confused them with “classes” defined by exclusively economic traits. In the differentiating grid established by Marx – and copied with automatic servility by the entire dominant tradition in the social sciences -, the distinctions of castes by spiritual, cultural, psychological, and political functions became invisible. As the fall of communism seems not to have been enough to eliminate the residual prestige of Marxism as a science, it is never too much to insist that there are more hierarchical differences among men than our vain sociology imagines. Economic distinctions, as E. P. Thompson (op. cit.) saw, are not even sufficient to define a class in the Marxist sense. And, if we resort to more complex and subtle distinctions, we will inevitably end up reintroducing the old theory of castes into the concerns of sociology (as, for example, Louis Dumont did in Homo Hierarchicus. The System of Castes and their Implications, trans. Carlos Alberto da Fonseca, São Paulo, Edusp, 1992 – a study unfortunately limited to the Hindu system, but sufficient to suggest the real subsistence of hierarchical differences of caste type in modern Western society). – In the sense in which I employ the terms here, adapted to the modern situation, “priestly caste” simply means those in charge of guiding the people spiritually – a category that ranges from gurus and magicians (authentic or false, it doesn’t matter), priests and high dignitaries of secret societies to broad-scope ideologues, academics, scientists and technicians, and the small fry of intellectuals from universities, the publishing movement, and the press. “Aristocratic caste” means all those who exercise political-military power or are in a position to claim it: this goes from rulers to opposition politicians, through the upper echelons of public service, union leaderships, and that portion of the urban or rural capitalist entrepreneurship that has enough strength to do lobbying. There are obviously intersections, which do not erase the essential dividing line. Below these two castes, there are the entrepreneurs without direct political power, whatever their size (which goes from the large politically isolated businessman to small traders and rural owners, as well as the entire portion of the middle class that is only concerned with civil life, without directly interfering in politics), and further down still the immense mass of laborers, ranging from the politically “alienated” proletariat to the pariahs and dispossessed of all sorts, provided they do not exercise political power through social movements or organized banditry (for in this case they are part of the aristocratic caste). This classification is based on the actual distribution of power, and not on mere economic abstractions; and, without being deceived by appearances and formalisms, it understands that the highest form of power is the one that governs the minds of men; hence, that of the priestly caste, which generates the aristocracy and, by raising it to political power, then judges and eventually condemns it, overthrowing it with the help of the lower castes; only the caste that holds spiritual power can legitimize the status quo or change it, whether peacefully or by violence; defining power exclusively by economic and political criteria was a dirty trick of the intelligentzia to hide its own power. Regarding the psychology of the castes, ideally considered and outside of any reference to modern societies, v. Olavo de Carvalho, Elements of Spiritual Typology (booklet), São Paulo, IAL, 1988. On the forms of power of the upper castes, also considered outside of the current context, v. René Guénon, Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power, Paris, Vega, 1947, as well as Georges Dumézil, Myth and Epic, already cited. Regarding the castes in the current context, I have never read any work that was worth it, but I acknowledge the debt that, for the formation of my ideas on the subject, I owe to my dear teacher and friend, the late Juan Alfredo César Müller, for the teachings received in unforgettable conversations, late into the night, on his estate in the Cantareira forest, São Paulo.↩

  227. Bertrand de Jouvenel, op. cit., passim., demonstrated that the course of Western political history from the Roman Empire to the Second World War clearly moved in the direction of concentrating power by extinguishing or neutralizing intermediate social powers. The examination of the five decades that followed Jouvenel’s work’s publication shows that the denounced tendency has even further intensified.↩

  228. “There has always been a privileged class, even in America, but it has never been so perfectly isolated from its neighbors,” rightly points out Christopher Lasch (op. cit., p. 12).↩

  229. Here I speak as the spokesperson for the common man, but of course, personally, as a writer and intellectual, I have more information about the organization of power than the man on the streets and, when I want to, I make myself heard—just like any other intellectual—by the political power. The intellectual, even without a penny in his pocket, needs to be very hypocritical not to include himself in the category of the “powerful.”↩

  230. Not to forget, of course, the network of public education, forming mini-agents of social transformation necessary for the new laws to become widespread customs. We will see this later.↩

  231. Entropic disorganization: in London, as reported by The Times on January 8, 1995, a group of enraged lesbian militants, the Lesbian Avengers, began operations, invading bars, promoting brawls and autos-da-fé, where they burn their enemies' magazines and newspapers on large public bonfires. Their target of attack is not the establishment or the traditional family but… the gay movement! Gay chauvinism, according to them, is the greatest offense to the dignity of the lesbian cause… It is predictable that protests of the same kind will soon arise from transvestites and transsexuals, discriminated against by macho men who only like macho men; then the transsexuals will revolt against the drag queens for caricaturing the feminine form; then, the sadomasochists will protest for their rights, immediately splitting into sadist and masochist parties. And so on, for there is no limit to entropic fragmentation once opinion currents are determined by libido.↩

  232. It is also no coincidence that, in Brazil, the most popular defender of neoliberalism — Mayor Paulo Salim Maluf — is also the first ruler to seek to interfere decisively in citizens' private habits, through laws on the use of seat belts and on smoking.↩

  233. On Sweden, read the indispensable report by Janer Cristaldo, The Sexual-Democratic Paradise, Rio de Janeiro, Cia. Editora Americana, 1978.↩

  234. Although not a father, a highly awarded gay writer, in the Jornal do Brasil of 1996, defends pedophilia as a just and healthy practice, as children, at the age of three, already have a tremendous sex appeal and seduction games that would make Sharon Stone jealous. Nobody jumped at the speaker’s throat, nor kicked him out, let alone remembered to sue him for advocacy of crime. They are all educated, cultured people, with delicate souls and aesthetic feelings incompatible with violent instincts. Only to me did it seem to have occurred the idea that it would be hard to resist the impulse to shoot down, like a mad dog, anyone who approached my children imbued with such a doctrine.↩

  235. This process was initially observed in countries under totalitarian rule and precisely described, even before World War II, by Jan Huizinga (cf. In the Shadows of Tomorrow: A Diagnosis of the Spiritual Malady of Our Time, translated into Portuguese, Coimbra, Arménio Amado, 1944). Huizinga highlights the phenomenon of puerilism as one of the characteristics of these societies, which treat purely playful activities with reverent attention and juvenile matters with levity; for example, they produce highly knowledgeable football technicians while leaving philosophical and theological discussions to semi-literate journalists. This phenomenon is now on a global scale.↩

  236. Citoyen: a terrible word, its aura of prestige comes from oblivion: the main right granted to the citoyen by the French Assembly was the compulsory service in the Army, under penalty of the guillotine. With this, the Revolution threw to the winds one of the most beautiful achievements of civilization—the personal freedom not to wage war, respected since the Roman Empire—and inaugurated the era of systematic involvement of civilian populations in widespread slaughter. Citoyen means: subject of the militaristic bureaucracy.↩

  237. “The future belongs to us”—title and refrain of the Hitler Youth anthem.↩

  238. Why are young people today in such a hurry to “achieve” before the age of twenty-five and become depressed when they fail to do so? Because the mythology of our time has associated the idea of youth with the meaning of life, so that, after youth, life no longer has any meaning.↩

  239. Fúlvia Rosenberg, a professor at PUC São Paulo and researcher at the Carlos Chagas Foundation, found that of the total of 4,520 “street children” in São Paulo, only 895 slept on the streets; the others had homes and families, and many attended schools. Among the children covered by the research, some were exploited by adults, while others were simply making a living, but—according to the Jornal do Brasil of May 22, 1995— “one particular group caught the researcher’s attention: poor teenagers who went to live on the streets because they faced family conflicts and decided to leave home. She found that the reason for the problem, in this case, was more in the typical rebellion of adolescence than in the child’s poor origin.” Fúlvia Rosenberg’s conclusion is that there is no link, as the prevailing opinion of the intelligentsia establishes, between poverty and the phenomenon of “street children.” What exists—adding my own observation—is a link between exacerbated juvenile rebellion and the ideologies propagated for decades by the intelligentsia, which then places the blame on the economic structure of society.↩

  240. Free and secure: is that not what the Ministry of Health promises us?↩

  241. Summarizing Patricia Mongan’s book, Farewell to the Family? (London, Institute of Economic Affairs, 1995), Janet Daley writes in her column in The Times, Jan 5, 1995: “What we are producing is a new ‘warrior class’ of men separated from the socializing influence of the family and domestic responsibilities… It is only a matter of time before some demagogue seeks to organize this anarchic delinquency. These displaced men are the ideal fodder for fascist recruitment.” Morgan argues that this is happening because the British government has adopted “a program of financial disincentives to marriage and family stability, from which only the most determined (and affluent) couples can escape its disadvantages. A single mother with two children can work 20 hours a week at £4 an hour and end up with £163.99 after taxes and rent. A married man with two children working 40 hours at the same rate will be left with only £130.95. Working full-time, he will earn £33 less than the single mother working part-time. Ask yourself why, then, a working-class girl should consider a husband as anything less than useless. And she will be further encouraged in this conviction by her middle-class feminist sisters whose ideology helped create this fiscal policy. The State now regards every person as a self-limiting, atomized unit with strict mathematical equality in fiscal terms. The fact of being married counts for nothing… Marriage is no longer recognized by legal and fiscal systems.” Emphasizing that this entire situation was created during Mrs. Thatcher’s liberal government, the columnist highlights that an old left-wing slogan – “scratch a liberal and find a fascist” – is becoming true, but in a different sense than leftists used to give it. It’s not that the liberal is inherently fascist, but rather that liberal (or more properly, liberationist) policies create hordes of isolated and resentful men who will be the masses of fascist militants tomorrow.↩

  242. About NGOs, see “The Democracy of NGOs and the Dictatorship of Marketing” in O Imbecil Coletivo.↩

  243. See Alfred Sauvy, L’Économie du Diable, Paris, Le Seuil, 1989.↩

  244. See the essay “Relativist Trap” in The Collective Imbecile.↩

  245. Foreign guests sometimes differ from the unanimity. Such was the case with Nicole Loraux in the Ethics cycle, and Raymond Trousson in the Libertines/Libertarians one. To the great scandal of Sade’s admirers, the professor from the Free University of Brussels stated (in the conference of June 20, 1995) that the libertine is essentially a tyrant, a Machiavellian dissembler, devoted to the humiliation of women and the destruction of love — something everyone already knew, except the local neo-libertines, who consider themselves libertarians for some reason only understandable in the light of Epicurus' logic.↩

  246. It’s more or less the thesis of Eric Voegelin, which I subscribe to as far as I could understand it, because I know it only from minor works and I have not read the author’s fundamental work, Order and History [Note to the 2nd ed.: After reading Order and History, I see nothing substantial to change in this interpretation of mine, only to deepen, which would not be appropriate to do in this volume. It is worth adding that the essentially gnostic character of the movements that culminate in the New Age of the 20th century was affirmed in 1994 by Pope John Paul II himself (Crossing the Threshold of Hope, cit. in Ricardo de la Cierva, Las Puertas del Infierno. The Untold History of the Church, Madrid, Fénix, 1995, p. 35)].↩

  247. Nelson Lehman da Silva’s very valuable study, A Religião Civil do Estado Moderno (Brasília, Thesaurus, 1985), presents an overview of the works of various authors who focus on contemporary ideologies as “civil theologies,” in the sense of St. Augustine. Of these works, the most comprehensive and systematic is that of Eric Voegelin. This book of mine fits into this line of concerns, with some specific differences that stand out from the common background: 1st, it focuses on the emergence of modern physical sciences as a conditio sine qua non of civil religion, that is, it shows that the cult of Behemoth necessarily accompanies the rise of Leviathan’s power, of which it is the complementary opposite; in other words, the rise of civil religion is not a unilinear process, but marked by a fundamental duality, which I symbolize in the struggle of Behemoth and Leviathan; so that new conceptions of the State reflect profound changes in the conception of nature, which in turn express a new understanding (or misunderstanding) of logic and dialectics, as seen for example in Nicholas of Cusa (v. A Aristotelian Philosophy of Culture); 2nd, it associates the process of forming civil religion with the phenomenon of “two cultures” (C. P. Snow); 3rd, it associates the formation of civil religion with efforts to restore the Empire, emphasizing that they do not culminate in the outbreak of totalitarian ideologies, but in the globalisation of the American Revolution, i.e., that among modern ideologies, the one that seems least committed to the cult of Caesar is in fact the one that embodies it most fully and efficiently; 4th, it focuses on the struggle between traditional religions and civil religion from the point of view of caste conflict. Continuing, however, the tradition studied by Lehman, it highlights the role played in the formation of civil religion by pseudologics, such as the logic of Epicurus, rhetoric in general, Hegel-Marx dialectics, the false symbolic hermeneutics of occultism, etc., highlighting their common affiliation; it emphasizes the role of secret organizations in this process, not in the sense of their explicit political action (as focused by the spokespeople of a conspiratorial theory of History), but in the sense of passive contamination of society; and finally, updating the focus, it points out the role played in this context by ecological ideology, the New Age, and the new morals that are coming into effect in the neoliberal framework.↩

  248. V. Joseph Schumpeter, Imperialism, New York, Meridian Books, 1958, p. 64 ss. A brilliant synthesis of Schumpeter’s arguments, added to very pertinent analyses with regard to the Brazilian theory of dependence, is found in the book by J. O. de Meira Penna, The Ideology of the 20th Century. Essays on National-Socialism, Marxism, Third Worldism, and Brazilian Ideology, Rio de Janeiro, Nordic, 1994 — an indispensable read for those who wish to understand Brazil’s position in the world today.↩

  249. Deputy José Dirceu, accused of being the head of the PT’s espionage service, responded that there was no espionage service there at all, that the party merely received information given spontaneously by militants and sympathizers, as “informal collaborators”. This is to play innocent. All secret services in the world prefer the services of informal collaborators over professional agents. One of the secrets of the efficiency of Mossad (Israeli secret service) is to have a network of occasional informants spread all over the world (Zionist militants) and therefore be able to reduce the number of its professional agents to two thousand, including internal staff (see Victor Ostrovski and Claire Hoy, The Marks of Deception. Memories of an Agent of the Israeli Secret Service, Brazilian translation, São Paulo, Scritta Editorial, 1992). The KGB had in the communist militants, and not in the effective agents, its main force (see Christopher Felix, A Short Course in the Secret War, New York, Dell Books, 1986). The deputy cannot ignore these things, because he studied Mao Tse-tung and knows what he says about the importance of occasional informants for the success of a guerrilla. His Excellency excels in this field, having worked as a Cuban agent for five years (see Luís Mir, The Impossible Revolution, São Paulo, Best Seller, 1994, p. 617). Anyway, the deputy’s explanations seemed satisfactory to the press, which did not touch on the subject for almost a year. But is it normal for professional journalists to ignore everything about the functioning of information services? If we remember that the impeachment process of Nixon – so often cited as an example for Brazil in the Collor case – was not triggered by an accusation of corruption, but of political espionage, we will see that the national indifference to the case of the “spies”, compared to the extreme susceptibility against the corrupt, is a sign of complete loss of the sense of proportions in assessing the gravity of crimes. Or it is a sign that public opinion has already granted to the left the privilege of placing themselves above all human judgment.↩

  250. I explain more extensively about Gramsci in my book A Nova Era e a Revolução Cultural. Fritjof Capra & Antonio Gramsci (Campinas, VIDE Editorial, 2014, 4th ed.), which I recommend to those who consider the references I make here to the topic too compact and obscure.↩

  251. The difference is that at that time the left, still influenced by the ideology of the Front Popular tinged with “bourgeois humanism” for the purpose of alliance with the “progressive forces”, truly believed in ethical principles, whereas in a more recent era it began to mix public displays of moralism with the preaching of skepticism and relativism (this only for select audiences).↩

  252. Appealing to moralistic denunciations at times when the discourse of class struggle is low is one of the classic tactics of the left. Even during the final stages of the French Revolution, right after the failure of Babeuf’s extremist conspiracy, “the Jacobins continued their propaganda in the country, but since they felt that the Babeufist program was more unpopular than ever, they quickly changed their watchword, replacing the ‘war against the rich’ with the 'war against the 'rotten ones”, a skillful campaign that could gather under the same flag all discontented people from all parties. Moreover, the mine was inexhaustible, and there was no reason to fear a shortage of arguments" (Pierre Gaxotte, La Révolution Française, Paris, Arthème Fayard, 1928, reissued 1968, p. 482).↩

  253. “There is a growing concern at the Planalto Palace that the National Council for Food Security, which will take place in Brasília at the end of the month, will end up becoming a big act of Lula’s campaign… Of course, no one imagines that Betinho will come forward to declare support for the PT, but everyone thinks that there is no way to establish the connection, since the operational part of the program is all in the hands of PT members. The government argues that those who operate the daily aspects of the campaign have influence over the population and their vote. Itamar [President Itamar Franco] observes the movements in silence, as he doesn’t want to take any public action, fearing that he would not be well interpreted if he appeared to be against the hunger-fighting campaign” (Dora Kramer, “Encontro da fome preocupa Itamar”, Jornal do Brasil, July 11, 1994, column “Coisas da Política”). The President himself became a prisoner of the psychological blackmail power invested in Mr. Betinho by the hunger-fighting campaign. One of the campaign’s basic goals was thus achieved. Anyone who understands that Betinho has never had any other concern in life than political matters realizes that with the hunger-fighting campaign, his greatest contribution was to complete a 180-degree turn in the left’s strategy, pushing it towards the Gramscian “cultural revolution”—in which one of the top priorities is the expropriation of moral authority from religion and its apparent transfer to left-wing leadership. Today, people fear displeasing Betinho as they once feared falling out of favor with the clergy. This change was achieved in an abnormally short period, as if by sleight of hand. For some time, the power of excommunication and beatification was implicitly and discreetly exercised by Betinho. Supported by the press, it became increasingly conspicuous, to the point of abdicating all sense of proportion. One sign was the Veja report on Protestant pastor Caio Fábio, who, blessed by Betinho for his links with the left, was labeled on the cover as “The Good Shepherd”, in a horrifying and insane schematism, to contrast him with the “Bad Shepherd”: Bishop Edir Macedo. Why is he bad? For the sin of having been acquitted in proceedings brought against him by his adversaries? For his political convictions and friendship with right-wing thinker Jorge Boaventura? For collecting contributions from his followers instead of asking the government for money? Because the spectacular rites of his church—traditional in Protestantism since at least John Wesley, not very different from the shows of Catholic preachers in the Middle Ages—offend the delicate aesthetic sensibility of his critics? Or, finally, because his charitable campaigns, without any official support, risk dismantling the left-wing improvised monopoly of charity? Having no legally valid evidence against Bishop Macedo, applauding or abhorring him is purely a matter of taste. To me, his style is as repugnant as it is to Veja's editors; but I know the difference between good taste and justice. Like them, I consider many of the interpretations that the bishop makes of the Bible to be absurd; but I do not take my theological opinions as articles of criminal law.↩

  254. In short, the campaign followed the general rule of a classic leftist strategy, as summarized by Roger Scruton: “The moral asymmetry—the expropriation by the left of the entire stock of human virtue—accompanies a logical asymmetry, that is, a presupposition that the burden of proof always falls on the other side” (Thinkers of the New Left, London, Longman, 1985, p. 5). Betinho ended up being overthrown by a dirty trick similar to the one used against his adversaries: maliciously judging a lawful act, giving it the appearance of a crime. In truth, Christian morality, which Betinho claims to adhere to, has nothing to oppose a man receiving money from the wicked to give to the needy, which is even a double good: it helps the poor person in need of money and partially redeems the wicked person by contributing to the good of others. What sincere Christian, able to save a shipwrecked person, would reject a stolen rope that someone offered to help with the rescue? If Betinho were a true spiritual person, he would have vigorously defended the propriety of his act, humiliating the malicious accusers. With his ridiculous political mea culpa before the press, he showed that he is just another Brazilian intellectual, hypersensitive to appearances and unconscious of the deep motivations of his own actions, even when they are good. Innocent of the accusation, he became guilty of moral inconsistency.↩

  255. Neither the strategy nor the tactics are entirely new. In the sixteenth century, Richard Hooker described very similar things, which he saw being put into practice by the Puritan revolutionaries. Here is a summary, extracted from Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (translated by José Viegas Filho, 2nd edition, Brasília, University of Brasília Press, 1982, pp. 102-103): “To set a movement in motion, one must first have a ‘cause’. The man who possesses it must severely criticize—‘where the multitude can hear him’—social evils, and especially the behavior of the upper classes. The frequent repetition of this act will lead the listeners to believe that the speakers must be men of great integrity, fervor, and holiness, for only particularly good men can be so deeply offended by evil. The next step is to concentrate popular resentment on the established government, attributing to its actions or inactions all defects and corruption, as they exist in the world due to human weakness. By imputing evil to a specific institution, the speakers prove their wisdom to the crowd, which would never have guessed at this connection on its own. After such preparation, the time will have come to recommend a new form of government as ‘the sovereign remedy for all evils’. This is because people who are averse to and dissatisfied with present conditions are foolish enough to ‘imagine that anything recommended to them would help; and they believe more in what they have had less experience of before’. It is also necessary for the leaders to ‘mold the notions and mental concepts of men in such a way’ that the followers automatically associate passages and terms from the Scriptures with their doctrine, however erroneous the association may be, and, with equal automatism, ignore the contents of the Scriptures that prove incompatible with the new doctrine. Then comes the definitive step: ‘to persuade the credulous and inclined to such gratifying errors that the special light of the Holy Spirit shines upon them’, so that humanity becomes divided between the ‘brothers’ and the ‘worldly’. With this consolidation, the social raw material is ready to receive the essential representation of a leader. This is because, according to Hooker, such people prefer the company of others involved in the movement to that of individuals outside it; they willingly accept advice from the indoctrinators; neglect their own interests to devote all their time to the service of the cause; and provide ample material assistance to the leaders of the movement. Women play an especially important role because they are emotionally more accessible, tactically well situated to influence husbands, children, servants, and friends, are more inclined than men to serve as spies, providing information about emotional ties within their circles, and, finally, are more liberal in terms of financial support. Once such a social milieu has been created, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to break it by persuasion.”↩

  256. The essence of the tactic was summed up in the boutade painted on the walls of Paris in May 1968: “Be realistic: demand the impossible.” An example of how it works: The Statute of the Child and Adolescent grants any Brazilian citizen the right to sue a school—municipal, for instance—that does not have a playground. The school will then have to sue the Municipality—from which it is an organ—to obtain the money for the playground. Since it is obvious that the money is often lacking, the result of exercising this “right” will be only to force numerous municipalities to sue themselves for the offense of lack of money, creating an atmosphere of malaise and mutual recrimination that will later be denounced by the press as a sign of a lack of leadership in municipal administration. It is a calculated effect, which only fails when the population, poorly “worked” by the agitators, remains indifferent to the new rights and does not play its part in the comedy. The example of the municipal school is just a miniature model: the 1988 Constitution is a complete system of Habermasian traps. It is unbelievable how almost nobody in this country seems to realize this. Has no one read that Lenin recommended fomenting corruption to later denounce it? Or does the myth of Brazilian cordiality prevent us from believing that there is someone here capable of such malice?↩

  257. Change thanks to which the moralizing wave, contrary to the plans of its mentors, ended up leading to good results. After all, the agitation of a few hundred intellectuals on the surface of historical moment can be just the perverse and caricatural expression of a deep and authentic demand of our people. Providence, which has an infinite stock of turns and twists, has never refused to use the services of the wicked to produce good through an ingenious and subtle redistribution of evils. In the divine economy, even the Mercadantes end up doing good they didn’t want. In fact, the course of events took a positive turn, quite different from what was expected and desired by the leftist inquisition. The Brazilian people, fundamentally sound, rejected at once, in the relentless verdict of the polls, both the champions of corruption and the heralds of morality: if the corruption accusations ended the political careers of the accused, they did the same with those of the accusers, to the point that political commentator Dora Kramer concluded that “ethics does not win votes”. The great winner was a man who, without having avoided the struggle against corruption, embodied the principle of prudence, according to which denunciations and accusations—which threatened to become the dominant theme of national political discussion—are actually minor occupations that should not distract from the essential: the objective plans and rational work for a better future. Fernando Henrique’s victory was, for Brazil, something like the liberation of a neurosis, the sudden and unforeseen dialectical resolution of the static confrontation between thieves and demagogues, in which many wished to keep our country trapped until they pushed it into despair, so that they could then present themselves as doctors of the disease they themselves had provoked.↩

  258. See Oswaldo Peralva, The Portrait (Belo Horizonte, Itatiaia, 1960), especially chapters 4 and 5, and John W. F. Dulles, Communism in Brazil, 1935-1945 (translated by Raul de Sá Barbosa, 2nd edition, Rio, Nova Fronteira, 1985), but above all Luís Mir, The Impossible Revolution, op. cit., pp. 11-13.↩

  259. The process of inner degradation that leads the exalted idealistic youth to become, in a shock of return, the coldest and most cynical of realists, in the Machiavellian sense of the term, has deep psychological roots and is described by Paul Diel (The Symbolism in Greek Mythology, Paris, Payot, 1966) as the basic mechanism of neuroses. See also, on this subject, my pamphlet The Abandonment of Ideals, Rio de Janeiro, IAL, 1987.↩

  260. Paulo Francis, an extraordinary talent and a man of vast culture (literary and political, understand), could do the same, but for some years now he has been writing in a telegraphic style that does not argue or prove, only states, and ends up being less terrifying than irritating, fostering unnecessary antipathies. The Mário de Andrade habit of starting sentences with a third-person oblique pronoun, which the reader automatically takes as a conditional conjunction, also only serves to confuse.↩

  261. Caio Prado Jr. had already proven the fallacy of this strategy, in one of the best books produced by the national leftism (A Revolução Brasileira, São Paulo, Brasiliense, 1969). But it was not good to remember this, on one hand because it would undermine the theoretical bases of the new “enlightenment” rhetoric, on the other because this book, correcting an error, helped create another, worse one: the massive adherence of the left to the thesis of armed struggle.↩

  262. This is not the place, obviously, to discuss more deeply the general trend of History towards the unification of humanity under increasingly broad and complex forms of government. Anyway, this trend is visible, it is a fact and does not need to be demonstrated on the theoretical plane. For further clarification, if necessary, see the classic by Ellsworth Huntington, Mainsprings of Civilization, New York, John Wiley and Sons, 1945 (several reissues).↩

  263. The name – based on that of certain Protestant movements – is totally misleading. It suggests, at first glance, the idea of a return to sources, of restoring an original purity, but what reformist or revolutionary movement does not adorn itself with the same pretension? In fact, Islamic radicalism, under the pretext of returning to the sources, sometimes proposes a total politicization of the religious impulse, along a line quite similar to that of Catholic “liberation theology”; and it moves even further away from the origins from the moment it disregards the spiritual legacy of the ancient mystical schools, the tassawwuff or “sufism”, which, with all the distortions and deviations it has suffered, still preserves some essential values to the Islamic tradition. See, regarding the different currents of Islamic thought and their antagonisms, Mohammed Arkoun, La Pensée Arabe, Paris, PUF, 1979, especially chap. V, and id. et al., Les Musulmans, Consultation Islam-Chrétienne, Paris, Beauchesne, 1971.↩

  264. See the splendid essay by Edmund Wilson, “Abraham Lincoln,” in Eleven Essays, selection and preface by Paulo Francis, trans. José Paulo Paes, São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 1991, p. 17 et seq.↩

  265. It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau – informs us Paul Johnson, op. cit. – who inaugurated the fashion of taking exhibitionism for sincerity, flaunting even fictional sins.↩

  266. A concept that finds its fullest expression in Gramsci, but which, with or without Gramsci, is widespread among the heads of almost all social and political thinkers in this part of the world.↩

  267. See Christopher Lasch, op. cit., passim.↩

  268. See Friedrich-W. Schelling, Introduction à la Philosophie de la Mythologie, trans. S. Jankélevitch, 2 vol., Paris, Aubier, 1945.↩

  269. But this fact must also be interpreted with caution, as Christopher Lasch says: "The number of people who profess belief in a personal God, belong to a religious denomination, and attend service with some regularity remains notably high, compared to other industrial nations. This evidence may suggest that the United States, in some way, has managed to escape the secularizing influences that have modified the cultural landscape in other parts of the world. Appearances are deceptive, however. Public life is totally secularized. The separation of church and state, now interpreted as a prohibition on publicly acknowledging any religion, is more deeply rooted in America than anywhere else in the world. Religion has been relegated to the back streets of public debate… A skeptical, iconoclastic state of mind is one of the characteristics of the educated classes. Their commitment to the culture of criticism is understood as the elimination of religious commitments. The elites' attitude towards religion ranges from indifference to hostility" (Christopher Lasch, op. cit., p. 247-248 – my emphasis).↩

  270. V. Frithjof Schuon, De l’Unité Transcendante des Réligions, 2e. éd., Paris, Le Seuil, 1979, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred. The Gifford Lectures, 1981, New York, Crossroad, 1981. The acknowledgment of my intellectual debt to F. Schuon does not imply in any way accepting him as the kind of universal guru or supreme arbiter of traditions that he somewhat claimed to be.↩

  271. Mt 20, 18-19 (trans. Fr. Antônio Pereira de Figueiredo).↩

  272. Interview given to the editor on September 22, 2014, in Richmond, Virginia.↩

  273. Deliverance (original title), 1972, film by John Boorman, starring John Voight and Burt Reynolds.↩

  274. Corruption of neoconservative.↩

  275. David Horowitz. The New Leviathan: How the Left-Wing Money-Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America’s Future. New York: Crown Forum, 2012.↩

  276. The entire debate with Alexandre Dugin, in which the author extensively develops the theory of the three globalist blocs, was published with the title The USA and the New World Order: A Debate Between Alexandre Dugin and Olavo de Carvalho, Campinas: VIDE Editorial, 2012 – NE.↩

  277. Malachi Martin, Windswept House – A Vatican Novel, New York: Main Street Books, 1998.↩

  278. To learn more, read my article “The Fathers of the American Crisis,” published in the Diário do Comércio on March 5, 2009, available at: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/090305dc.html.↩

  279. The reader must handle these editions of Mário Ferreira dos Santos with great care: they are full of gaps and interpolations that, in certain passages, seriously impair the understanding of the text.↩

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