This series of three newspaper columns by Olavo de Carvalho was collected in this order in the book “The Minimum You Need To Know So As Not To Be An Idiot”.
“The Juvenile Fool” criticizes the romanticized notion of youth as a time of rebellion and freedom, arguing that young people often conform to societal pressures and seek acceptance rather than true independence. It highlights the challenges faced by youth in their interactions with their peers and the tendency to blame their failures on their families. Olavo asserts that youth, despite their potential, often succumb to the influences of the majority and become susceptible to negative ideologies.
“Lost Generation” reflects on the importance of knowledge and the responsibility of individuals to acquire it before making judgments. It criticizes the cult of youth and the tendency of young people to believe they possess all the right answers without further study. Olavo laments the failure of many individuals who, despite being in positions of power and influence, long for their lost youth, attributing their dissatisfaction to external factors rather than personal responsibility.
“Paraná’s Youth” praises the students in Paraná, Brazil, for their humility and eagerness to learn. It contrasts these students with the general Brazilian youth who are often described as talkative, lazy, and opinionated without sufficient knowledge. The article criticizes the widespread belief that young people should have opinions on everything without the necessary foundation of understanding. It emphasizes the importance of humility and the recognition of one’s limitations in the pursuit of knowledge and intellectual growth.
The Juvenile Fool
Jornal da Tarde, São Paulo, April 3, 1998
I have believed in many lies, but there is one to which I have always been immune: the one that celebrates youth as a time of rebellion, independence, and love for freedom. I never gave credit to that nonsense, even when I myself was young and flattered by it. On the contrary, from an early age, I was deeply impressed by the herd mentality, the fear of isolation, the subservience to the prevailing voice, the eagerness to feel equal and accepted by the cynical and authoritarian majority, the willingness to surrender everything, to prostitute everything in exchange for a spot as a novice in the group of cool individuals.
The young person, it is true, often rebels against parents and teachers, but it is because they know deep down that they are on their side and will never retaliate with full force. The fight against parents is a theater, a game with marked cards in which one of the contenders fights to win and the other to help them win.
The situation of the young person is very different when it comes to their peers, who do not have the indulgence of paternalism towards them. Far from protecting them, this noisy and cynical mass greets the newcomer with contempt and hostility, which immediately show them the need to obey in order not to succumb. It is from their generation that they obtain the first experience of a confrontation with power, without the mediation of the age difference that grants discounts and mitigations. It is the realm of the strongest, the boldest, which asserts itself in all its cruelty over the fragility of the newcomer, imposing trials and demands on them before accepting them as a member of the horde. How many rituals, how many protocols, how many humiliations the applicant submits to in order to escape the terrifying prospect of rejection and isolation. In order not to be returned, powerless and humiliated, to the arms of their mother, they must pass an exam that requires less courage than flexibility, the ability to adapt to the whims of the majority — in short, the suppression of personality.
It is true that they submit to this willingly, with the passion of a lover who will do anything for a condescending smile. The mass of their generation represents, after all, the world, the big world into which the adolescent, emerging from the small domestic world, seeks entry. And admission comes at a high cost. The candidate must immediately learn a whole vocabulary of words, gestures, and looks, a whole code of passwords and symbols: the slightest failure exposes them to ridicule, and the rules of the game are usually implicit, needing to be guessed before being known, imitated before being guessed. The mode of learning is always imitation — literal, servile, and unquestioning. Entry into the world of youth rapidly ignites the engine of all human follies: the mimetic desire of which René Girard speaks, where the object does not attract by its intrinsic qualities but by being simultaneously desired by another, whom Girard calls the mediator.
It is not surprising, then, that the rite of entry into the group, costing such a high psychological investment, ultimately leads the young person to complete exasperation, preventing them, at the same time, from directing their resentment back towards the group itself, the object of their denied love, and thus having the power to transform every impulse of resentment into new loving investment. Where, then, will the resentment turn if not in the least dangerous direction? The family emerges as the providential scapegoat for all the young person’s failures in their rite of passage. If they fail to be accepted into the group, the last thing that will occur to them is to attribute the blame for their situation to the vanity and cynicism of those who reject them. In a cruel inversion, the blame for their humiliations will not be attributed to those who refuse to accept them as adults, but to those who accept them as children. The family, which has given them everything, will pay for the wickedness of the horde that demands everything from them.
This is what the famous rebellion of adolescence boils down to: love for the stronger who despises them, contempt for the weaker who loves them.
All mutations take place in the twilight, in the indistinct zone between being and non-being: the young person, in transition between what they no longer are and what they are not yet, is, by fate, unconscious of themselves, their situation, and the authorship and guilt of everything that happens within and around them. Their judgments are almost always the complete inversion of reality. That is why youth, since the cowardice of adults gave them the authority to rule and dictate, has always been at the forefront of all the errors and perversities of the century: Nazism, fascism, communism, pseudo-religious sects, drug use. It is always the young who are one step ahead in the direction of the worst.
A world that entrusts its future to the discernment of the young is an old and tired world that has no future left.
Lost Generation
Jornal da Tarde, São Paulo, August 3, 2000
Hyppolite Taine recounts that at the age of 21, when he found himself eligible to vote, he realized that he knew nothing about what was good or bad for France, nor about the ideologies in dispute in the election. He abstained from voting and began to study the country. Decades later, the five volumes of Origins of Contemporary France (1875) were published, a monument of historical science and one of the most enlightening books of all time. Young Taine did not vote, but mature Taine helped many generations, in France and beyond, to vote with more seriousness and knowledge, without being deceived by false alternatives of immediate propaganda. Knowing first in order to judge later is the number one duty of a responsible person—a duty that mandatory voting, under the pretext of teaching, forces us to unlearn.
Taine was widely read in Brazil, and his example bore some fruit. Among those whose life path was determined by his influence was the young Affonso Henriques de Lima Barreto. He learned from Taine that things may not be what they seem. As a novelist, he depicted the image of the constitutive ambiguity of human attitudes in the duel between Major Quaresma and Floriano Peixoto, where the traditionalist reveals himself to be a prophet and the progressive a narrow-minded and blind dictator. But the message of this story, even though consecrated by cinema, has not impregnated the minds of the new generations. Perhaps it will never do so precisely because, deprived of Taine’s ethical framework of prioritizing knowledge, it is reduced to a casual observation that can be dissolved in a deluge of clichés. Nowadays, it is rare to find a young person who does not want, above all, to “change the world” and who, based on this parti pris, postpones the duty to question what the world is.
Yes, in Brazil, culture and intelligence are things for after retirement. When all decisions have been made, when the weight of their effects has solidified into an irreversible torrent and existence decisively enters its final stage of decline, then citizens will think about acquiring knowledge—a knowledge that, by then, can only serve to inform them of what they should have done and didn’t. Anticipating the useless pains of late regret, they instinctively avoid confrontation, refraining from judging their lives in the light of what they now know.
Embalmed in a niche of aesthetic dilettantism, knowledge loses all its illuminating and transfiguring power, reducing itself to a harmless trinket, a harmless adornment of a depraved old age. This is where the life of someone who, in their youth, instead of waiting until they understand, succumbs to the flattering temptation of the first invitation and becomes a “participant,” a “world changer,” ends.
I also fell into that trap, but I was fortunate that my career as a world changer was halted early on by a deluge of paralyzing perplexities that forced me to abandon everything and go home to think. Harassed by questions that surpassed my capacity to answer, I was deprived, by the good Lord, of the opportunity to try to shape the world in the image of my own foolishness.
But such luck is rare. Brazil is the country of premature geniuses, degraded into senile fools at the very first turn of maturity. When I contemplate the decrepit circus of the magazine Bundas,1 where rusty comedians strive to repeat the performances of thirty years ago, which in their sclerotic imagination have petrified into stereotypical emblems of “life” and “youth”; when, reading Caros Amigos, I see white-haired men struggling to recapture their idealized image of the youthful gang from the “Golden Years,” I cannot help but notice that the dominant sentiment among all these people who speak on behalf of the future is a longing for themselves. These individuals are not lacking the awareness that their lives have failed. But they attribute the blame to others, to the military government that prevented their generation from “attaining power.” Yet, the excuse is false because, for better or worse, they are in power. They were young activists, and now they are congressmen, professors, successful writers, opinion leaders. So why do they nostalgically and resentfully lick the wounds of their lost youth? It is because it was lost in a much deeper and irreparable sense than mere political defeat. And now it is too late to turn back.
Paraná’s Youth
Folha de Londrina, April 26, 2003
In an already old book, Wilson Martins wrote that Paraná was “a different Brazil.” I have repeatedly confirmed this since I started teaching in this state two or three years ago. Today’s Brazilians are talkative and lazy: they study nothing and have opinions on everything. Paraná students are notably more humble and interested in learning.
The importance of humility in learning was emphasized in the Middle Ages by Hugh of St. Victor, one of the greatest educators of all time. Humility ultimately means having a sense of reality. The universal cult of youth has obscured this obvious truth to the point that everyone now considers it natural for a person of 15 or 18 years old to have opinions on all things and miraculously be more correct than their parents and grandparents. The result of this widespread belief is disastrous: all the totalitarian and genocidal movements of the last centuries—communism, Nazism, fascism, Islamic radicalism, and so on—were creations of young people, and their militancy was massively harvested in universities.
The cult of youth brings, as one of its essential components, disdain for knowledge: if upon leaving adolescence a person already has all the right ideas in their head, why continue studying?
In Brazil, this prejudice has become so deeply ingrained that it seems impossible to eradicate. The effect of this is that millions of young people, incapable of perceiving the most obvious realities, believe themselves to be invested with the divine right to judge all things, people, and events. In addition to knowledge, they sometimes lack even the minimum level of conscious integration, without which a person cannot even argue reasonably. Their arrogant pretension contrasts so deplorably with their lack of intellectual resources that no sensible educator would dare to teach them anything.
Very few students nowadays can distinguish general principles from positions on specific events. They adopt an opinion on this or that, on homosexuality, on the war in Iraq, and immediately turn it into a universal principle, drawing conclusions from it that contradict the very principles of logic or law on which they continue to base their reasoning on everything else. “The self-determination of peoples,” for example, is used to justify Saddam Hussein’s sovereignty while it is not applied to the Kurdish minority, and it is almost impossible to show the speaker that there is a contradiction there. In cases like these, a singular political opinion supersedes the foundational principles of logical reasoning itself, and a neurologically normal person ends up with the cognitive performance of a mentally handicapped individual. The other day, I came across a website of young homosexuals on the internet who demonized the USA, the promised land of the gay movement, and enthusiastically defended Islamic dictatorships, in which homosexuality is a crime punishable by death. In ancient Greco-Latin rhetoric, this was called a “suicidal argument,” like that of a Jew propagating Nazism. The suicidal argument was so rare that rhetorical manuals hardly mentioned it. Nowadays, it has become the most common thing in the world and, in the speeches of Brazilian students, almost a paradigm. The examples I cited are just two among thousands. The more flattered by parents and educators, the more youth becomes stupid and incapable, heralding a maturity of resentful, failed, and envious individuals.
I have encountered these types all over Brazil, but I guarantee you: among Paraná students, their numbers are much smaller.
I don’t know how to explain this phenomenon. I am not familiar enough with the cultural history of the state to venture a hypothesis. I merely point out the fact and acknowledge seeing in it a rare sign that not all is lost for the culture of this country.
-
Editor’s Note: Bundas (“Butts”) magazine, a satire of Caras (“Faces”) magazine, was launched in June 1999 by Editora Pererê. Leading the initiative, which aimed to revive the laid-back language of the old Pasquim, launched thirty years earlier and discontinued less than ten years ago, was cartoonist Ziraldo. Contributors included Luis Fernando Verissimo, Chico and Paulo Caruso, Frei Betto, Aldir Blanc, and others. Millôr Fernandes distanced himself early on. With declining sales and lack of advertising, the magazine had to cease its activities in December 2000 after 77 regular editions and three special almanacs.↩
No comments:
Post a Comment