Thursday, August 3, 2023

Revolution, by Olavo de Carvalho

This series of thirty-five 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”. It is divided into eight parts.

The first part is titled “Globalism”. It dives into various aspects such as "The globalist revolution", which unveils the changing face of international politics and power structures. Then it explores the concepts that are "Omnipresent and invisible", highlighting global influences we don’t readily see. In "Planetary Lula", a focus is placed on specific global leaders and their impact. This is followed by "Who invented Brazil?", a historical analysis of the country’s roots. Lastly, “A fifteen-century history” offers a wider perspective on the world’s evolution over 1500 years.

The series then transitions into its second part, “Manipulation”. It opens with a discourse on “Culture wars” before delving into "The elite turned into masses", an exploration of social status and power. The narrative continues with “Weapons of freedom” and "The demolition of consciousness", discussing societal control mechanisms. It further analyses these mechanisms in "Engineering of complacency", and how they’re "Driven by force". The section concludes with "Hypnotic servitude", a critique on the power dynamics of manipulation.

Part three is called “Mentality”, and it starts with "The revolutionary mindset". This part delves into the psyche of revolutionaries, with particular attention to the polarity in “Right vs. Left”. It continues to explore “Still the revolutionary mindset” and the "The corporealist illusion". This section also delves into “Ascetics of evil” and "The structural lie".

The fourth part, “Society x guilt”, explores societal dynamics and culpability. It features provocative titles such as “Straight from hell” and "The formula to drive the world mad". It also includes a look at a “Just society” and outlines a "General rule".

Part five, “Capitalists x revolutionaries”, seeks to compare and contrast these two groups. It examines "Capitalism and Christianity", discusses "Good and evil according to Olívio Dutra", and scrutinizes the relationship between "Money and power".

The sixth part, “Money x knowledge”, ventures into the complex interplay between wealth and wisdom. It covers a range of topics from “Mortal vanity” to "The counterculture in power", the dynamics of "The collective suicide of the rich", and ends with a historical reference in "Remember Karl Radek".

Part seven, “Revolutionaries x better world”, poses a provocative question about the ultimate goals and outcomes of revolutionary actions. It covers "The only absolute evil", the concept of "The transfiguration of disaster", and ends on a hopeful note with "At last".

Finally, part eight, “Unmasking”, seeks to reveal hidden truths. This last part exposes "The good old double tongue", explores the link between "Double tongue and strategy", and gives advice on "How to debate with leftists". Each part is designed to guide readers on a thought-provoking journey through the complex themes of revolution and change.

1. Globalism

The globalist revolution

Economic Digest, September/October 2009

For anyone seeking to navigate today’s politics—or simply to understand something of the history of past centuries—nothing is more urgent than gaining some clarity about the concept of “revolution.” Both in public opinion and in academic studies, there is great confusion about it, mainly because the general idea of revolution is often formed based on fortuitous analogies and blind empiricism, instead of seeking the deep and permanent structural factors that define the revolutionary movement as a continuous and overwhelming reality for at least three centuries.

To give an illustrious example, in his classic work The Anatomy of Revolution, historian Crane Brinton attempts to extract a general concept of revolution by comparing four major historical events nominally considered revolutionary: the English, American, French, and Russian revolutions. What do these four processes have in common? They were moments of great ideological ferment, resulting in substantial changes in the political regime. Is that enough to classify them uniformly as “revolutions”? Only in the popular and impressionistic sense of the word. Although I cannot, within the scope of this writing, justify all the conceptual and methodological precautions that led me to this conclusion, what I observe is that the structural differences between the first two and the last two phenomena studied by Brinton are so profound that, despite their equally spectacular and bloody appearances, they cannot be classified under the same label.

Legitimately, we can only speak of a “revolution” when a proposal for a comprehensive transformation of society is accompanied by the demand for the concentration of power in the hands of a ruling group as a means to achieve that transformation. In this sense, there have never been revolutions in the Anglo-Saxon world, except for Cromwell’s, which failed, and the English Reformation, a very particular case not to be discussed here. In England, both the nobles' revolt against the king in 1215 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 sought to limit central power rather than concentrate it. The same happened in America in 1786. And in none of these three cases did the revolutionary group attempt to change the structure of society or established customs, instead forcing the government to conform to popular traditions and customary law. What can be common between these processes, more restorative and corrective than revolutionary, and the cases of France and Russia, where a group of enlightened individuals, imbued with the project of a completely unprecedented society radically opposed to the previous one, seizes power with firm resolve to transform not only the system of government but also the morality and culture, customs and usages, and the mentality of the population, even human nature in general?

No, there have been no revolutions in the Anglo-Saxon world, and this fact alone would suffice to explain the global preeminence of England and the USA in recent centuries. If, in addition to the defining structural factors—the project of radical societal change and the concentration of power to achieve it—there is something common to all revolutions, it is that they weaken and destroy the nations where they occur, leaving behind nothing but a trail of blood and the psychotic nostalgia for impossible ambitions. France, before 1789, was the wealthiest country and the dominant power in Europe. The revolution inaugurated its long decline, which now, with the Islamic invasion, reaches pathetic dimensions. Russia, after a semblance of artificial imperial growth made possible by American aid, dismantled itself into a lawless land dominated by bandits and irrepressible corruption. China, after the miraculous feat of starving 30 million people in a single decade, was only saved when it renounced the revolutionary principles that guided its economy and willingly surrendered to the abominable delights of the free market. As for Cuba, Angola, Vietnam, and North Korea, I won’t say anything: they are theaters of Grand Guignol, where chronic state violence is not enough to hide indescribable misery.

All the misunderstandings surrounding the idea of “revolution” stem from the prestige associated with this word as a synonym for renewal and progress, but this prestige precisely derives from the success achieved by the English and American “revolutions” which, in the strict and technical sense in which I use this word, were not revolutions at all. This semantic illusion prevents the naive observer—and I include much of the specialized academic class in this—from seeing the revolution where it occurs under the camouflage of slow and apparently peaceful transformations, such as the implementation of the world government unfolding before the bewildered eyes of the masses.

The sufficient distinguishing criterion to eliminate all hesitations and misunderstandings is always the same: with or without sudden and spectacular transmutations, with or without insurrectional or governmental violence, with or without hysterical accusations and general killing of opponents, a revolution is present whenever a project of profound transformation of society, if not the entire humanity, is on the rise or in the process of implementation through the concentration of power.

It is by not understanding this that liberal and conservative currents often, in opposing the most conspicuous and repugnant aspects of some revolutionary process, end up unconsciously fostering it under some other aspect, the peril of which escapes them at the moment. In today’s Brazil, the exclusive focus on the evils of “petism” (referring to the Workers' Party) and similar movements may lead liberals and conservatives to court certain “social movements,” in the illusion of exploiting them electorally. What escapes the vision of these false smart ones is that such movements, at least in the long run, play an even more decisive role in the implementation of the new socialist world order than the nominally radical left.

Another dangerous illusion is to believe that the advent of planetary administration is an inevitable historical inevitability. The ease with which tiny Honduras broke the legs of the globalist giant shows that, at least for now, the power of this monstrosity is merely a monumental bluff.1 It is the nature of every bluff to extract its vital substance from the fictitious belief it manages to instill in its victims. Quite often, I see liberals and conservatives repeating the stupidest slogans of globalism, such as the notion that certain problems—narcotrafficking, pedophilia, etc.—cannot be tackled at a local scale and require the intervention of a global authority. The nonsense of this statement is so evident that only a state of hypnotic somnolence can explain why it enjoys any credibility. Aristotle, Descartes, and Leibniz taught that when you have a big problem, the best way to solve it is to subdivide it into smaller units. The globalist rhetoric cannot stand against this methodological rule. Expanding the scale of a problem can never be a good way to confront it. The experience of certain American cities, which practically eliminated crime within their territories using only their local resources, is the best proof that, instead of enlarging, we must diminish the scale, subdivide power, and face the evils at the level of direct and local contact rather than getting intoxicated by the grandeur of global ambitions.

That globalism is a revolutionary process, there is no denying. And it is the broadest and most ambitious process of all. It encompasses the radical mutation not only of power structures but also of society, education, morality, and even the most intimate reactions of the human soul. It is a complete civilizational project, and its demand for power is the highest and most voracious ever seen. There are so many aspects that compose it, so many movements it encompasses, that its very unity escapes the horizon of vision of many liberals and conservatives, leading them to make disastrous and suicidal decisions at the very moment they strive to halt the advance of the “left.” The idea of free trade, for example, which is so dear to traditional conservatism (and even to myself), has been used as a tool to destroy national sovereignties and build, on their ruins, an all-powerful universal Leviathan. A correct principle can always be used in the wrong way. If we cling to the letter of the principle without noticing the strategic and geopolitical ambiguities involved in its application, we contribute to turning an idea created as an instrument of freedom into a tool for the construction of tyranny.

Omnipresent and invisible

Diário do Comércio, March 26, 2012

When hearing that they live in a “democracy,” the common citizen imagines that, despite some sordid plots woven by politicians behind the curtains, the power structure that dominates society coincides with the visible framework of institutions and, ultimately, can be controlled through the pressure of public outcry or the exercise of voting. Some hidden residue here and there will sooner or later be revealed by brave journalists who expose the sewers, revealing thieves and conspirators to the light of day to face the penalties of the law. However, I regret to inform you that at least twenty years ago, this system ceased to exist. The power of governments over civilian populations has become practically uncontrollable, reducing the difference between democracy and dictatorship to a mere legal formality. No, this is not some “conspiracy theory.” Conspiracies exist, but they are not what produce this state of affairs. On the contrary, it is this state of affairs that now makes the creation of an all-powerful global government viable, immune to any attempt at popular control. This phenomenon results from the convergence of three factors.

  1. The increasing complexity of public administration, continuously reinforced by contributions from technology and social sciences, provides governments with all sorts of instruments to implement measures as they please without having to go through legislative control, let alone public debate. Of the fundamental decisions that have altered the structure of power in the world in the last two decades, diluting sovereignties and transferring authority from states to international organizations, only a tiny part has been subject to parliamentary discussion, and most haven’t even received media coverage proportional to the vastness of the political consequences they produced.

  2. The progressive concentration of media in the hands of a small number of large economic groups close to state power, coupled with the takeover of newsrooms by a new generation of ideologically committed journalists, has transformed newspapers, magazines, and TV channels from vehicles of information and debate into agencies of behavioral engineering and political control. The censorship of inconvenient news, the exclusion of divergent opinions, the shameless promotion of leftist idols, and systematic advocacy for the objectives championed by the globalist revolution have become almost standard editorial practices, cynically imposed everywhere as the epitome of neutral and objective journalism. Overnight, explosively revolutionary values and criteria, hostile to the feelings of almost the entire population, have been presented as if they were the majority and obligatory opinion, the supreme standard of normality. Throughout the West, for example, there is not a single major newspaper or TV channel that does not treat any opposition to LGBTQ+ and abortion proposals as aberrant and criminal conduct, creating the impression that the new codes of behavior they wish to impose are universal millennia-old consensuses, rejected only by fanatics and mentally ill individuals. It is evident that this is not journalism at all; it is a psychological theater planned to produce behavioral changes. It is the engineering of complacency, which I have previously discussed.2

  1. The fall of the USSR left militant masses disoriented and orphaned everywhere, releasing an enormous human potential that, not knowing how to live without a “social cause” to justify their existence, was easily realigned to serve, now amply subsidized by the financial elite, under the new banners of the global revolution. It was the complete victory of Fabianism and Gramscism over the more archaic versions of the communist movement. With impressive speed, local militant groups were unified, creating, for the first time in human history, the possibility of almost instantaneous mass mobilizations on a global scale—the most formidable machine of political pressure and psychological intimidation the world has ever known.

Under the influence of these three factors, the old representative democracy has become merely the legal and publicity camouflage of new power schemes that the majority of citizens do not understand and generally do not know.

Thanks to this, the advancement of global tyranny is now so fast, so intense, so overwhelming that to document, simply document the daily succession of events that exemplify it would require an entire newspaper, not this poor weekly comment. Not a day goes by without new power structures, new means of social control, new instruments of psychological manipulation being created, almost always with a brutal, often destructive impact, not only on politics and the economy but on private life and the minds of all human beings placed under their orbit. And these facts unfold, almost all of them, beyond public attention, either because they are produced by discreet bureaucratic means, bypassing debate, or because they are not reported, or because they are intentionally reported deficiently, summarily, and euphemistically, so that only a minimal and harmless fraction of the population becomes aware of their true scope and significance.

Antonio Gramsci’s dream of an “omnipresent and invisible power” is now a reality throughout the Western world.

Planetary Lula

O Globo, January 3, 2004

If Homer was right in saying that the mills of the gods grind slowly, then the national brain must be divine, for it processes the most obvious information at an infinitely slow pace. The philosopher Raymond Abellio, who knew us well, observed that in this part of the universe, the germination of ideas does not follow historical rhythms but rather geologic time. Nothing illustrates this better than the persistent ignorance of the Brazilian elites regarding the issue of world government. Our business and political leaders still live in a time when any mention of the subject could be easily dismissed, with a contemptuous smile, as a “conspiracy theory.” However, at least ten years ago, the United Nations officially declared its intention to consolidate itself as a planetary administration: "The problems of humanity can no longer be solved by national governments. What is needed is a world government. The best way to achieve it is by strengthening the United Nations."3

The overwhelming authority of this project is now the unique and central source from which uniform legislation on industry, trade, ecology, health, education, racial quotas,4 civil disarmament5, etc., gushes out upon the entire population of Earth. The docility with which even powerful nations like England bend to its demands—though none with the enthusiastic servility of Brazil—partly stems from the informal, subtle, and tacit nature of the process. It is being implemented in homeopathic doses, delicately, without acknowledging its overall existence, transferring complex decisions labeled as too intricate for public opinion to the closed chambers of technical committees, thereby anticipating a fait accompli against the mere possibility of open discussion.

The only resistances encountered come from the USA and Israel.

However, the USA remains in a constant oscillation between the desire to assert its independence against globalist ambitions and the temptation to take the reins of the process to steer it in its own way. Assuming leadership in global standardization, risking losing sovereignty and disarming against lethal aggression, or else entrenching itself in nationalist self-assertion with the risk of dismantling the apparent “international order” and enduring the consequent hostility—these are the options offered to the USA. The first of these tendencies predominated in the Clinton administration. The result was that, through concession after concession, Americans consented to weaken themselves militarily and to bow to foreign interference in vital areas such as ecology, education, and immigration, all while wearing the mask of leaders and major beneficiaries of globalization, making themselves the scapegoat for the very evil that weakened them. With the Bush administration, the orientation turned 180 degrees. The turning point came in 2001 with the rejection of the Kyoto Protocol6 and the decision to react to September 11th without the blessing of the UN.

The global government project is originally communist7, and Western economic groups that allowed themselves to be seduced by the idea, hoping to benefit from it, always ended up funding communist movements while expanding their own businesses globally. The Ford and Rockefeller foundations8 are the most notorious examples. In these and other cases, the contradiction between the involved economic interest and long-term political ambitions gives rise to countless ambiguities that disorient the observer and, if he is lazy, lead him to stop thinking about the matter.

One thing is certain: in the seventies and eighties, globalization seemed to favor the USA, but in the following decade, it took a clear turn towards a global anti-American and, by extension, anti-Israeli articulation. The election of George W. Bush and the policy of national assertion that he has pursued are logical responses to this new situation.

How does this affect Brazil?

Luiz Inácio da Silva was brought to power with the support of the global network of parties and organizations woven around the UN. This network constitutes the core of the world government, which is in an advanced stage of implementation. The exorbitant international applause that greeted the election of the Workers' Party candidate did not come out of nowhere: it was the natural expression of the creator’s jubilation at the success of his creation. If the very choice of Brazil as the venue for the World Social Forum, just a few months before the elections, was not enough evidence of the global coordination set up for this purpose, the obscene haste with which the network mobilized to attempt to give the citizen a Nobel Prize for the “Zero Hunger” program before a single spoonful of state-provided beans reached the mouth of any hungry person would suffice as confirmation ex post facto. The first Nobel on credit in history was not awarded, but it is revealing.

In this context, the mobilization against the “American empire” is now merely a vast diversionary operation to camouflage the implementation of the true empire and to place the nationalist whims of poorly informed peoples at its service, more inclined to slap conventional scarecrows than to identify and confront the true sources of the limitations that oppress them. Fighting against the mere theoretical possibility of an American world domination, nations of cretins yield everything to a global dictatorship that is practically victorious in the present.

Who invented Brazil?

Zero Hora, June 11, 2006

If all means of production are nationalized, there is no market. Without a market, products have no prices. Without prices, price calculations cannot be made. Without price calculations, there is no economic planning. Without planning, there is no nationalized economy. “Communism” is just a hypothetical construct devoid of materiality, a name without anything inside, a universal abstract formalism that does not escape Occam’s razor unscathed. There never was and never will be a communist economy, only a camouflaged or perverted capitalist economy, good only for sustaining a gang of politically cute leeches.

Since Ludwig von Mises explained these obvious points in 1922,9 many consequences followed.

Even though the communist leaders, however stupid they might have been, immediately understood that the wise Austrian was right, they could not publicly admit it. Tolerating increasing doses of legal or clandestine capitalism in the territories they dominated, they stubbornly continued to search for arrangements that masked the inevitable. Eduard Kardelij, the Yugoslavian Minister of Economy, even imagined that a commission of enlightened planners could determine the prices of millions of goods one by one by decree, from supersonic planes to sewing needles. The idea was never put into practice because it resembled too much the Portuguese method of killing cockroaches by throwing a mothball at each one. The Soviets allowed officially banned capitalism to continue flourishing in the shadows and account for almost 50% of the USSR’s economy. Hence the swarm of millionaires that emerged overnight when the Soviet state collapsed: they could never have existed in a regime that effectively prohibited private property.

Some major Western capitalists drew from von Mises' demonstration some more pleasant conclusions (for themselves). If a communist economy was impossible, all efforts ostensibly aimed at creating it would end up generating something else. That something else could only be hidden capitalism, as in the USSR, or half-baked socialism, a symbiosis between the power of the state and the most powerful economic groups, an oligopoly, in short. Both hypotheses promised formidable profits - the former due to the absolute absence of taxes, the latter due to the state guarantee offered to government friends against less-endowed competitors. If the former still involved some minor risks (extortion, personal revenge of poorly bribed public officials), the latter was absolutely safe.

It was then that a group of billionaires devised the most Machiavellian strategic plan in world economic history — they invented the formula ironically summarized by columnist Edith Kermit Roosevelt (Theodore Roosevelt’s granddaughter): “The best way to fight communism would be a new socialist order governed by ‘experts’ like themselves.” This idea spread like wildfire among the members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the powerful New York think tank. The policy adopted by all American governments since then (except Reagan) towards the Third World, based on combating the “extreme left” by supporting the “moderate left,” was directly created by the CFR. The scheme was foolproof: if the “moderates” won, monopolism would be established; if the communists came to power, Plan B would automatically come into action, the clandestine capitalism. The “extreme left,” presented as “the” enemy, was not the real target; it was only the left hand of the plan. The true target was the free market, which should perish under the double attack of its enemies and its “defenders,” who, using the scarecrow of communist revolution, induced it to make ever-increasing concessions to the supposedly prophylactic socialism of the “good” left.

Reducing the range of political options to a dispute between communists and social democrats has been the constant goal of the billionaire inventors of the new global order for half a century. Today’s Brazil is the laboratory of their dreams.

A fifteen-century history

Jornal da Tarde, June 17, 2004

With the dismantling of the Empire, churches scattered throughout the territory became substitutes for the shattered Roman administration. In the general confusion, while the forms of a new era were barely discernible amidst the mists of the temporary, priests became notaries, judges, and mayors. The seeds of the future European aristocracy sprouted on the battlefield, in the struggle against the barbarian invader. In every village and parish, community leaders who stood out in the defense effort were rewarded by the people with land, animals, and coins; by the Church, with titles of nobility and the legitimizing anointing of their authority. They became great landowners, and counts, and dukes, and princes, and kings.

Agrarian property was never the foundation or the origin but the fruit of their power. Military power. Power of a fierce and haughty caste, enriched by the sword and not the plow, averse to mixing with others, and therefore not engaging in the cultivation of intelligence, suited only for priests and women, nor in the cultivation of the land, the task of serfs and tenants, nor in business, the occupation of bourgeoisie and Jews.

For over a millennium, Europe was governed by the force of arms, supported by the tripod of ecclesiastical and cultural legitimization, popular obedience translated into labor and taxes, and financial support obtained or extorted from traders and bankers in times of crisis and war.

Its rise culminates, and its decline begins, with the foundation of absolutist monarchies and the advent of the nation-state. It culminates because these new formations embody the power of the warrior caste in its pure state, a source unto itself directly delegated by God, without the mediation of the priesthood, reduced to the subordinate position of forced and recalcitrant accomplice. But it is already the beginning of the decline because the absolute monarch, coming from the aristocracy, stands out from it and has to seek support against it — and against the Church — from the third estate, which thus becomes an independent political force, capable of intimidating the king, the clergy, and the nobility together.

If the medieval system lasted for ten centuries, absolutism lasted no more than three. The reign of liberal bourgeoisie will last even less. A century of economic and political freedom is sufficient to make some capitalists so extraordinarily rich that they no longer want to submit to the vagaries of the market that enriched them. They want to control it, and the instruments for that are three: control of the State, to implement the statist policies necessary for perpetuating the oligopoly; encouragement of socialist and communist movements that invariably favor the growth of state power; and the enlistment of an army of intellectuals who prepare public opinion to bid farewell to bourgeois freedoms and happily enter a world of omnipresent and oppressive repression (extending to the last details of private life and everyday language), presented as a paradise adorned with both the abundance of capitalism and the “social justice” of communism. In this new world, the essential economic freedom for the system’s functioning is preserved to the strict extent necessary to subsidize the extinction of freedom in the political, social, moral, educational, cultural, and religious domains.

Thus, the megacapitalists change the very foundation of their power. They no longer rely on wealth as such but on the control of the political-social process. This control, freeing them from the adventurous exposure to market fluctuations, makes them a durable dynastic power, a neo-aristocracy capable of traversing fortune’s variations and generational succession unscathed, sheltered in the stronghold of the State and international organizations. They are no longer megacapitalists: they are metacapitalists — the class that transcended capitalism and transformed it into the only socialism that ever existed or will exist: the socialism of the grand lords and the social engineers in their service.

This new aristocracy does not arise, like the previous one, from military heroism rewarded by the people and blessed by the Church. It is born of Machiavellian premeditation based on self-interest and, through a false clergy of subsidized intellectuals, blesses itself.

The question remains as to what kind of society this self-invented aristocracy will create — and how long a structure so obviously based on lies can endure.

2. Manipulation

Culture wars

Diário do Comércio, January 2, 2006

“The secret lies in the very nature of power,” said René Guénon. Those who ignore this rule nowadays are condemned to serve as blind and docile instruments for the realization of political plans of enormous scope, which remain entirely invisible and inaccessible to them. This is particularly true in the case of the so-called “cultural wars,” whose movements, subtle and long-term, escape the perception not only of the masses but also of almost all political, economic, and military elites. Everyone suffers their impact and is deeply altered in the process, even in their most intimate and personal reactions, but they generally attribute this effect to the spontaneity of historical processes or to an inherent inevitability in the nature of things, without having the slightest idea that even this reaction was calculated and produced in advance by strategic planners.

The idea of having been unconsciously manipulated by someone smarter is so humiliating that everyone instinctively rejects it indignantly, without realizing that refusing to see the strings that move them makes them even more easily manipulable. The fear of being ridiculed as gullible is a powerful stimulant of political naivety, and in the cultural war, the exploitation of this fear has become one of the most widespread rhetorical procedures, building a wall of prejudices and conditioned reflexes against the perception of realities that would otherwise be obvious and evident.

Another difficulty is that the weapons used in the cultural war are, by definition, almost exclusively owned by the intellectual and scholarly class, eluding not only the comprehension but also the interests of the common citizen, even the elite, not engaged in complex studies of literary and cultural history, philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, rhetorical art, psychology, and even sociology of art. In the entire National Congress, in the management of large companies, and in the military commands, one will not find half a dozen carriers of the knowledge required to understand the concept, let alone the concrete perception of cultural war operations. Especially in third-world countries, the education of the ruling elites is massively concentrated in the studies of economics, administration, law, political science, and diplomacy. For these individuals, letters and arts are at best an elegant adornment, a playful complement to the “heavyweight” activities of politics, military life, and the economy. Their weekend forays into theaters and concerts may foster interesting conversations, but they will never give them that comprehensive view of the cultural universe without which the very idea of an organized and controlled action on the whole culture of a country (or even several) would be unthinkable. In fact, for these people, it is unthinkable. Culture appears to them as the autonomous and uncontrollable flourishing of “tendencies,” creative impulses, and multitudinous inspirations that express the “common sense,” the background of opinions and feelings shared by all, the spontaneous and “natural” vision of reality.

For the strategist of the cultural war, however, “common sense” is a social product like any other, subject to be shaped and altered by the organized action of a militant elite;10 feelings and reactions that, for the common citizen, constitute the most personal expression of their inner freedom, are for the social planner merely mechanical copies of collective molds that he himself has fabricated; that the overall direction of cultural transformations is not the expression of the community’s spontaneous desires but the calculated effect of plans conceived by an intellectual elite unknown to the majority of the population — all of this appears to him both an insult to his freedom of conscience and an attack on the order of the world as he conceives it. But this reaction is deeply out of sync with historical time.

The essential characteristic of our time is precisely the planned cultural transformation, and whoever is unable to perceive it will be deprived of the possibility of offering a conscious response: no matter how much money they have in their pockets or how high a position they hold in the political, legal, or military hierarchy, they will be reduced to the status of a “puppet” in the most despicable sense of the term. The dream of the Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century — an entire society at the mercy of the plans of the “enlightened” elite — has become achievable two centuries later thanks to three factors: the expansion of university education, creating a mass of intellectuals with undefined functions in society and ready to be recruited for militant tasks; the progress of the media, which allows reaching entire populations from a few broadcasting centers; and the enormous concentration of wealth in the hands of some oligarchic groups imbued with messianic ambitions.

The elite turned into masses

Diário do Comércio, December 1, 2008

In 1939, Eric Voegelin observed that the essential conditions for democracy, as conceived in the 18th century, no longer existed. On one hand, the economy and public administration had become so complex that the common citizen could no longer meet the minimal conditions to form a rational opinion. Their reasoning had retreated to the narrow circle of professional and family activities, leaving their political choices at the mercy of emotional attachments, childish desires, dreams, and fantasies that made them easy prey for totalitarian propaganda. On the other hand, the new classes emerging in modern society—the urban proletariat, the lower public servants, office employees—were quite different from the small property owners who founded the enlightened democracy. They exemplified Ortega y Gasset’s “mass man,” more inclined to rely blindly on the magic of state planning and collective discipline than to pursue personal independence. Everything in the world invited totalitarianism.

Seventy years later, society’s composition has become even more vulnerable to totalitarian manipulation. The advent of massive numbers of underemployed people, entirely dependent on state protection, combined with the destruction of intellectualism through the global transformation of universities into centers of revolutionary propaganda, has practically reduced the entire electorate to a mere instrument of manipulation. The consequences for democracy have been devastating:

  1. The vast majority of voters have lost the notion of personal independence, and those who still understand it are increasingly willing to relinquish it in exchange for government protection, social benefits, and the like.

  2. The defense of public and private liberties has become irrelevant. The mystique of “planning” has taken hold of all consciences to the extent that what remains of public debate today is nothing more than the clash between different—and generally not very different—magical plans.

  3. The possibility of independent social initiatives has been practically eliminated as NGO regulations have turned them into extensions of the state administration and instruments of mass manipulation by the enlightened and billionaire elite.

  4. “Freedom of opinion” has been reduced to merely adhering to various pre-molded propaganda discourses. Rational examination of the situation has become virtually incomprehensible, being marginalized or forcibly incorporated into one of the existing propaganda discourses.

  5. The implementation of policies of totalitarian control—over the economy, culture, religion, morals, and private life—has proved fully compatible with the survival of the formal electoral process, now considered sufficient to confer the title of “democracy” upon a nation. Whether under the name of “mass democracy” or “democracy of masses,” dictatorship by democratic means has become virtually universal.

  6. Restricting the use of rationality to immediate professional activities, leaving political choices at the mercy of irrational dreams and desires, is no longer limited to the lower classes. The “elites” themselves—businesspeople, military personnel, journalists, and opinion makers in general—are as dependent on propaganda, slogans, and illusory images, and as incapable of a realistic examination of the state of affairs, as the office workers mentioned by Eric Voegelin. When a political analyst presents them with facts, reasons, well-founded diagnoses, and accurate predictions, the “elite” feels uncomfortable. It doesn’t get offended when you withhold the truth from them, as was the case with the Foro de São Paulo or the biography of Barack Hussein Obama, but when you tell them any truth that diverges from the stereotyped pseudo-certainties of the popular media, now invested with pontifical authority. The elite, in short, has become the mass—and as the mass, it does not want knowledge, vision, or maturity; it seeks that comfort, that psychological support, those anesthetic illusions that the totalitarian manipulators will never cease to provide.

The exercise of reason today is a privilege shared only between the great strategic planners and behavioral engineers who, for obvious reasons, would not consider sharing it with anyone else, and the independent scholars who try in vain to share it with those who do not desire it.

Weapons of freedom

Diário do Comércio, December 17, 2009

The most obvious thing in the analysis of history and society is that when the situation changes significantly, you can no longer describe it with the same old concepts: you have to create new ones or critically refine the old ones to account for unprecedented facts that cannot be framed within familiar genres.

It is pathetic to observe how, even in the midst of the implementation of world government, political analysts in universities or the media continue to offer analyses to the public based on outdated concepts of “nation-state,” “national power,” “international relations,” “free trade,” “democracy,” “imperialism,” “class struggle,” “ethnic conflicts,” etc., when it is clear that none of these have much relevance to the facts of the present world.

The most basic events of the last fifty years are: first, the rise of globalist elites disconnected from any identifiable national interest and committed not only to building a world state but also to creating an entirely artificial, unified planetary pseudo-civilization conceived not as an expression of society but as a means of society’s control by the State; second, the marvelous progress of human sciences, which have placed in the hands of these elites means of social domination never dreamed of by tyrants of earlier times.

Decades ago, Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972), the creator of General Systems Theory, aware that his contribution to science was being misused, already warned: “Perhaps the greatest danger of modern totalitarian systems is the fact that they are terribly advanced not only in the realm of physical or biological technology but also in the realm of psychological technology. The methods of mass suggestion, of releasing the instincts of the human beast, of conditioning or controlling thought, have been developed to a formidable degree. Modern totalitarianism is so terribly scientific that compared to it, the absolutism of earlier periods appears as a lesser evil, dilettante, and comparatively harmless.”

In L’Empire Écologique: La Subversion de l’Écologie par le Mondialisme,11 Pascal Bernardin explained in greater detail how General Systems Theory has been used as the basis for constructing a global totalitarian system, which, in the last ten years, has definitively transitioned from a mere project to an evident reality, visible to anyone who is willing to see. However, von Bertalanffy was not referring solely to his own theory. He speaks of “methods,” in the plural, and the common citizen in democracies cannot even imagine the plethora of resources made available to the new masters of the world by psychology, sociology, and so on. If von Bertalanffy had to mention names, he would not omit that of Kurt Levin, perhaps the greatest social psychologist of all time, whose Tavistock Institute in London was established by the global elite itself in 1947 with the sole purpose of creating means of social control capable of reconciling the permanence of formal legal democracy with the complete domination of the State over society.

Just to give you an idea of how far this goes, the educational programs of almost all nations in the world, in force for at least the past twenty years, are determined by homogeneous standards directly imposed by the UN and designed not to develop the intelligence or moral consciousness of children, but to make them docile creatures, easily moldable, devoid of character, ready to enthusiastically adhere, without question, to any new watchword that the global elite deems useful to its objectives. The means used for this purpose are “non-aversive” control techniques, conceived to make the victim, by yielding to authority’s impositions, feel as if doing so voluntarily and develop an immediate irrational defense reaction to the mere suggestion of critically examining the subject.

It would be an understatement to say that the mass application of these techniques “influences” public education programs: they are the entire content of current school education. All subjects, including mathematics and sciences, have been reshaped to serve the purposes of psychological manipulation. Pascal Bernardin himself meticulously described this phenomenon in Pedagogue Machiavelli.12 Read it, and you will discover why your child cannot solve a quadratic equation or complete a sentence without three solecisms but comes home from school talking tough like a commissar, demanding that parents behave “politically correct.”

The speed with which sudden shifts in mentality, many of them arbitrary, grotesque, and even absurd, universally impose themselves without encountering the slightest resistance, as if emanating from irrefutable logic rather than despicable Machiavellianism, could be explained by the simple school training that prepares children to accept new fashions as divine commandments.

But, clearly, the school is not the only agency committed to producing this result. The mainstream media, now massively concentrated in the hands of globalist mega-corporations, plays a fundamental role in the dumbing down of the masses. For this purpose, one of the most widely used techniques today is cognitive dissonance,13 discovered by the psychologist Leon Festinger (1919-1989). Let’s see how it works. If you read today’s American newspapers, you will know that Tiger Woods, the golf champion, one of America’s most beloved citizens of recent times, is now under heavy bombardment from newspapers and TV news because they discovered he had mistresses. Scandal! Horror! General indignation threatens to cut half of the adulterer’s sponsorships and exclude him from the ranks of “wonderful people” who appear in ads for tennis, chewing gum, and miraculous diets. But there is one detail: alongside the protests against the athlete’s immorality, fierce attacks are made on “right-wing extremists” who do not accept abortion, gay marriage, or the early sexual induction of children. The two mutually contradictory moral codes are presented simultaneously, as equally obligatory and sacrosanct. Excited and impelled to all sexual excesses but at the same time threatened with character assassination if he practices even modest doses of them, the distressed citizen reacts with a kind of intellectual collapse, becoming a servile fool who no longer knows how to guide himself and pleads for a voice of command. The command can be hollow and senseless, as, for example, "Change!,"14 but when it comes, it always sounds like a relief.

Blaming scientists for this state of affairs is as idiotic as blaming guns for homicides. Men like von Bertalanffy, Levin, and Festinger created instruments that can serve both the construction of tyranny and the reconquest of freedom. It is our responsibility to take these weapons out of the hands of their monopolistic holders and learn to use them with an inverted sign, freeing our spirit instead of allowing it to be enslaved.

The demolition of consciousness

Diário do Comércio, December 21, 2009

Anyone who has understood my article “Weapons of Freedom” must have also perceived the implicit conclusion to which it inevitably leads: a significant part of the moralizing effort expended by the “religious right” to cleanse a corrupt society is futile, as it ends up being easily absorbed by the machinery of “cognitive dissonance” and used as an instrument of general perdition.

Note well: morality is not a list of praiseworthy and condemnable behaviors ready for citizens to obey with the automatism of a Pavlovian rat.

Morality is consciousness, personal discernment, the pursuit of a goal of perfection that only gradually becomes clearer and finds its means of realization amid the contradictions and ambiguities of life.

Saint Thomas Aquinas already taught that the greater problem of moral existence is not knowing the abstract general rule but bridging the gap between the unity of the rule and the inexhaustible variety of concrete situations, where we are often squeezed between conflicting duties or find ourselves lost in the distance between intentions, means, and results.

Luther — not to be accused of bias towards the Catholic side — insisted that “this life is not devotion, but the struggle to achieve devotion.”

And the holy Father Pio of Pietrelcina said: “It is better to withdraw from the world little by little, instead of all at once.”

Great literature — starting with the Bible — is full of examples of distressing moral conflicts, showing that the path of good is only a straight line from the divine perspective, encompassing everything in a simultaneous glance. For us, who live in time and history, everything is hesitation, twilight, trial, and error. Only gradually, guided by divine grace, does the light of experience dissipate the fog of appearances.

Conscience — especially moral conscience — is not an object, a thing that you possess. It is a permanent effort of integration, the pursuit of unity beyond and above immediate chaos. It is the unification of diversity, the resolution of contradictions.

The codes of conduct consecrated by society, transmitted by education and culture, are never the solution to the moral problem. They are reference frameworks, very broad and generic, supporting the conscience in its effort to unify individual conduct. They are to each person’s conscience what the design of a building is to the work of the builder: giving a rough idea of what the final shape of the work should be, not how the construction should be undertaken at each of its stages.

When the codes are multiple and contradictory, it is the very final form that becomes incongruent and unrecognizable, wearing souls down with vain efforts that will lead them to become entangled in increasingly insoluble problems and, in a great number of cases, to give up any serious moral effort altogether. Much of the reigning relativism and amorality are not properly beliefs or ideologies. They are diseases of the soul acquired through the exhaustion of moral intelligence.

In such circumstances, fighting for this or that particular moral principle, without considering that, in the reigning mixture, all principles are good as fuel to keep the machinery of cognitive dissonance functioning, can be catastrophically naive. What needs to be denounced is not this or that specific sin, this or that specific form of immorality: it is the entire framework of a culture set up to destroy, at its foundation, the very possibility of moral conscience. The case of Tiger Woods, which I mentioned in the article, is one among thousands. Adultery scandals erupt every hour in the same media that advocates abortion, free sex, and gay rights. The contradiction is so obvious and constant that no cluster of curious coincidences could ever explain it. It is a political choice, the planned demolition of moral discernment. Many people who are scandalized by specific immoralities do not even remotely perceive the industry of general and permanent scandal, where denunciations of immorality conveniently integrate as gears in the production line. Either the fight against evil begins with the fight against confusion, or it only ends up contributing to the confusion between good and evil.

Engineering of complacency

Trade Journal, April 11, 2012

Outraged by the servile conformity with which Americans, once so attached to civil liberties, are accepting the government’s increasingly aggressive intrusions into their private lives, economist Walter Williams finally realized that “the anti-smoking movement partially explains current American complacency. The anti-smoking zealots started with ‘reasonable’ demands, such as the Health Ministry warnings on cigarette packs. Then they demanded non-smoking areas on airplanes. Encouraged by success, they demanded a total smoking ban on airplanes, and then in airports, restaurants, and workplaces. All in the name of health. Noticing the complacent response from smokers, they began to ban smoking on beaches, in squares, and on the sidewalks of big cities. Now they are clamoring for more expensive health insurance premiums for smokers. If they had presented their full list of demands from the start, they would have gotten nothing. Using the anti-smoking crusade as a model and seeing Americans so complacent, the zealots and aspiring tyrants are increasingly expanding their agenda”.15

My readers and listeners can testify that for a decade and a half, or more, I have been explaining the obvious: the anti-smoking campaign never had anything to do with health. Predictably from the start, there has been nowhere, despite the evident decrease in the number of smokers, any proportional reduction in the incidence of diseases allegedly “caused by smoking”. But the patent absence of promised results, instead of questioning the initial premises of the campaign and moderating anti-smoking rhetoric, as would be expected from soi-disant scientific minds, is answered with new demands, increasingly arrogant, hysterical, invasive. Anti-smoking, like socialism, thrives on redoubling the bluff after each new refutation of its claims, transforming the chronic failure of the advertised nominal goals into a public and political success. It does not lack, for that, an untiring and vociferous militancy spread throughout Europe and the Americas, composed of a well-subsidized activist elite and an idiotic mass of “true believers” increasingly fanaticized. So fanatical that even the repeatedly proven use of fraudulent propaganda means (such as the forged photos that our Ministry of Health printed on cigarette packs) does not lead them to doubt, for a single moment, the suitability of the campaign.

Behind what the believers imagine, militant anti-smoking has never aimed to protect anyone’s health. It was just a first successful experiment in behavioral engineering on a planetary scale. It was a trial balloon, preparing for the implementation of increasingly drastic, intrusive controls, aimed at reducing the population of the entire West to an amorphous mass incapable of reacting to any imposition, no matter how arbitrary, harmful, and absurd, coming from the self-constituted globalist elite in world government.

The choice of theme was especially crafty, aiming to seduce conservatives, evangelicals, and moralists in general, disarming them in advance of any subsequent campaigns based on the same model and using their own strength to suffocate in the “spiral of silence”16 the few dissenting voices. Once you have ceded everything to the alleged scientific authority of international organisms on “health”, it becomes difficult to raise your head when this authority, in turn, extends its domains to areas of food, school education, sexual morals, family life, and so on. The dizzying ease with which the revolutionary elite has instrumentalized its most ardent opponents is symbolically condensed in a comic, or tragicomic detail that denotes the structural fragility of the anti-statist reaction: the use of tobacco is strictly prohibited in the headquarters of libertarian organizations that advocate for the legalization of marijuana.

What surprises me is that even a privileged intelligence like Walter Williams took so long to notice that anti-smoking, using the ruse of progressively expanded demands (the famous frog in the pot technique), imposed much more than its nominal goal of restricting cigarette consumption: it imposed, along with it, a new authority, a new power scheme, a new legislative procedure, a new command system that can be activated at any moment, with almost infallible guarantees of automatic obedience, to spread among the masses the standardized reactions that the global elite well wishes. The triumph of anti-smoking arrogance will never bring the announced beneficial effects to the population’s health, but after it, Western humanity will no longer be the same. Complacency towards the intrusive State seems to have taken root once and for all in the spirit of the masses, ending the era of free discussion and inaugurating that of servile passivity and hatred of divergence.

Driven by force

Diário do Comércio, September 24, 2012

Abortion, gay marriage, racial quotas, civilian disarmament, draconian ecological regulations, drug legalization, state control of religious conduct, reduction of the age of sexual consent to 12 years or less – these are some of the ideals that make the hearts of students, teachers, politicians, journalists, NGO activists, “enlightened” entrepreneurs, and other individuals monopolizing the public debate in this country beat faster.

None of these proposals came from the Brazilian people or any other people. None of them have their approval.

But that doesn’t matter. They have been and will continue to be imposed from top to bottom, here as in other countries, through parliamentary deals, administrative measures calculated to bypass legislative debate, massive propaganda, boycotts, explicit repression of opposing opinions, and last but not least, generous distribution of bribes, many of them disguised as “research funds” offered to professors and students under the condition that they reach politically desired conclusions.

Where do these ideas come from, the techniques used to disseminate them, and the money that subsidizes their forced implementation?

The source of these three elements is unique and always the same: the billionaire Fabian and globalist elite that dominates the world banking network and controls the economies of dozens of countries, as well as all international regulatory bodies.

Nothing in their plans and actions is secret. To understand the unity of an enterprise whose implementation extends over a whole century and involves the contributions of thousands of highly prepared collaborators – a pleiad of geniuses from the humanities and sciences – one must gather and study a mass of facts and documents that far exceeds the capabilities of the general population, including the “intellectual proletariat” of universities and the media, where this same enterprise gathers the bulk of its support and useful idiots.

In general, neither their followers and servants, nor the population horrified by the visible results of their policies, have the slightest idea of who is the historical agent behind the process. The former are carried away by the apparent attractiveness of the proclaimed nominal goals and naively believe that they are fighting against the “capitalist elite.”

The population sees the world getting worse and occasionally rebels against this or that specific change, against which they brandish the commandments of traditional morality in vain, without even dreaming of suspecting that these punctual and sporadic reactions are already foreseen in the overall scheme and channeled in advance towards the desired results of the enlightened elite.

To explain the comfortable invisibility that, after decades of open action worldwide, the most ambitious revolutionary project of all time continues to enjoy, one does not even need to appeal to the famous esoteric adage that “the secret protects itself.”

In the midst of the picture, there are, of course, some secrets, as well as the suppression of unwanted news, ordered from the highest levels and practiced with remarkable subservience by the journalistic class. But these are by no means the decisive factors.

What has made the populations defenseless victims of changes they neither desire nor understand are three factors: (a) the unequal struggle between a highly qualified intellectual and financial elite and the mass of people who receive information and education only from this same source; (b) the continuity of the project over several generations, transcending the historical horizon of each of them; (c) the prodigious flexibility of Fabian-globalist conceptions, whose unity lies entirely in long-term goals and which, in the variety of immediate situations, can chameleon-like adapt to the most diverse ideological, cultural, and political demands, without any dogmatism, without any of the paralyzing rigidity of the old communist parties.

To see the unity and coherence behind the dazzling diversity of actions undertaken by this elite throughout the Western world, one needs, in addition to the mass of data, some descriptive concepts that the vulgar “social scientist” completely ignores.

It is necessary to know, for example, that “nations” and “classes” are never subjects or agents of history, but merely the recipient into which the true agents inject the active substance of their plans and decisions. This should be obvious, but who in an academic intelligentsia intoxicated with Marxist mythology (or, in part, with doctrinal formalism of liberal-conservative orientation) understands that only groups and entities capable of lasting unchanged over generations can have the presumption to lead the historical process?

Among these groups, dynastic families, of noble origin or not, stand out, forming the living nucleus of the globalist elite. When these families have at their service the world academic class, international regulatory bodies, the bulk of media companies, the planetary network of NGOs, and, through them, even the mass of enraged militants who imagine they are fighting against those who actually direct them, who can resist such concentrated power?

Certainly, only the two competing globalist schemes, the Russo-Chinese and the Islamic. But the “better world” they promise is no more human or free than the one to which the Fabian elite is forcibly leading us.

Hypnotic servitude

O Globo, July 15, 2000

A good part of the news last week described the debates about the gay parade in Rome as a confrontation between the homosexual movement and the “extreme right.” It is a typical example of vocabulary manipulation that, when adopted on a global scale, has more persuasive power than any argument or explicit advertising campaign.

The semantic shift of the “extreme right” towards the center aims to create in public opinion, through repeated irrational suggestion, an association between the hideous image of Nazi-fascism and any resistance, no matter how minimal and discreet, that opposes the whims and demands of the enraged militants.

Extremism, by definition, is the use of violent means to impose even more violent changes, such as Darwinian racial laws or the forced suppression of religion. When the mass media, with the greatest air of innocence, begins to label any peaceful citizen who adheres to the commandments of their old religion instead of bending with quick solicitude to the sudden demands of hysterical revolutionaries as “extremist,” we are facing an obvious case of manipulation, intended to force the rapid implementation of new habits and values through deceit, evading the risks of honest and open debate.

If someone were to say, explicitly, that being against male-male marriages is Nazism, the grotesque lie would be exposed immediately. Embedded in news phrases, it passes as harmless obviousness. Repeated a few times, it can already be proclaimed aloud without the risk of challenge: the internalized habit blocks conscious objections.

Most of humanity has no defense against this trickery. Squeezed between the hypothesis of yielding to the new watchwords and the suspicion of being a Nazi sympathizer, how many citizens will have the time and prudence to take a step back, to reject the formulation of the problem, to dismantle the logical trap set to limit their view of the facts and their capacity for choice? The majority will simply accept the option imposed upon them. It is true that each isolated concession means little. But the accumulated effect of thousands of small concessions is the complete compromise of the soul, the complete abdication of critical judgment. This cannot even be called voluntary servitude: it is hypnotic servitude.

A press that subjects its readers to this treatment has no idea what democracy and freedom of opinion truly mean, as it strives to eliminate them while pretending to defend them. There can be no meaningful debate without conscious access to the issues at stake. Just as with overt censorship, the intentional transfer of choices to the hazy realm of unconscious reactions is an abuse of authority, a cynical arrogance that suppresses the right to know, the foundation of the right to opine.

The false labeling of extremism is just one example among thousands. Nowadays, no one can consider themselves a free and responsible citizen, capable of voting and discussing like a mature person if they are not informed about the techniques of language and consciousness manipulation that certain political forces use to deceive them, a mortal aggression against democracy and freedom.

These techniques are massively, constantly, and persistently employed in the media and schools. Despite their immense variety, all of them are based on induced distraction, the subtle blockade of conscious judgment. Opinions that, if presented clearly, would provoke the most stubborn opposition, are easily accepted when presented implicitly and wrapped in a mist of inattention. Entire publications, TV programs, and textbooks are full of planned inattention from beginning to end.

Until the 1970s, when most of these techniques were still in the laboratory study phase, intellectuals were interested in the subject, investigated it, and discussed the immorality and danger of the imminent threat they posed to democracy.

Charles Morgan raised the alarm in “Liberties of the Mind,” Aldous Huxley in “Brave New World Revisited,” Arthur Koestler organized international congresses to discuss the danger, and Ivan Illich conducted memorable research on the manipulation of consciousness by the medical and educational establishment.

Suddenly, the discussions ceased, and the denounced techniques began to enter, one by one, without the slightest resistance, into the daily use of newspapers, schools, and TV channels. It is not surprising that this change was accompanied by a wide recruitment of “progressive” intellectuals for international organizations, NGOs, intelligence services, and other entities interested in leading the discreet psychic mutation of peoples. Nowadays, there are virtually no more independent intellectuals. They have all grown tired of “interpreting the world” and have accepted to be well paid for “transforming it.”

The elite of activist intellectuals who now pull the strings are so cynical that they even invent the most artificial ideological justifications for this Machiavellian maneuver. It is useless to argue rationally, proclaims Richard Rorty: all we can do, he says, is “subtly instill our ways of speaking in people.” And Antonio Gramsci, ahead of his time, had already created a whole theory of “passive revolution” to demonstrate that the sly indifference of the distracted crowd is equivalent to explicit adherence and is enough to prove that the takeover of power by the communists was a democratic choice of the people.

How can one not see the extraordinary dose of malice, arrogant presumption, and contempt for freedom of conscience in these doctrines of charlatans and tyrants?

3. Mentality

The revolutionary mindset

Diário do Comércio, August 16, 2007

Ever since it became known that I am writing a book entitled “The Revolutionary Mindset,” I have received many requests for a preliminary explanation regarding the phenomenon designated in this title.

“The Revolutionary Mindset” is a historically identifiable and continuous phenomenon, whose developments over five centuries can be traced through an infinity of documents. This is the subject of the investigation that has occupied me for some years. “Book” is perhaps not the right expression because I have presented some results of this study in classes, conferences, and articles, and I don’t even know if I will ever have the strength to reduce this enormous material to an identifiable printed format. “The Revolutionary Mindset” is the name of the subject and not necessarily of one book, or two, or three. I have never been overly concerned with the editorial format of what I have to say. I investigate the subjects that interest me and when I reach conclusions that seem reasonable, I convey them orally or in writing as opportunities arise. Transforming this into “books” is a chore that I would leave to an assistant if I had one. As I don’t have any assistants, I keep postponing this task as much as I can.

“The Revolutionary Mindset” is not essentially a political phenomenon but a spiritual and psychological one, although its most visible field of expression and fundamental instrument is political action.

To simplify things, I use the expressions “revolutionary mind” and “revolutionary mindset” to distinguish between the concrete historical phenomenon, with all the variety of its manifestations, and the essential and permanent characteristic that allows grasping its unity over time.

“The Revolutionary Mindset” is the state of mind, permanent or transitory, in which an individual or group believes themselves capable of reshaping society as a whole – if not human nature in general – through political action, and believes that, as agents or bearers of a better future, they are beyond all judgment by the present or past humanity, with only the “court of history” to whom they are accountable. But the court of history is, by definition, the very future society that this individual or group claims to represent in the present; and since this society can only witness or judge through this same representative, it is clear that this person becomes not only the sole sovereign judge of their own actions but also the judge of all humanity, past, present, or future. Empowered to accuse and condemn all laws, institutions, beliefs, values, customs, actions, and works of all eras without being judged in turn by any of them, they are so above historical humanity that it is not inaccurate to call them supermen.

The self-glorification of the superman, the “revolutionary mindset,” is inherently totalitarian and genocidal, regardless of the ideological content it takes on in different circumstances and occasions.

Refusing to be accountable to anything but a hypothetical future of their own invention and firmly committed to destroying by cunning or force any obstacle that opposes the reshaping of the world in their own image and likeness, the revolutionary is the greatest enemy of the human species, making the tyrants and conquerors of antiquity pale in comparison due to the modesty of their ambitions and remarkable circumspection in their means.

The advent of the revolutionary to the forefront of the historical stage – a phenomenon that begins to emerge around the 15th century and becomes evident in the late 18th century – inaugurates the era of totalitarianism, world wars, and permanent genocide. Over the course of two centuries, revolutionary movements, the wars undertaken by them, and the killing of civilian populations necessary for consolidating their power have killed far more people than all the wars, epidemics, earthquakes, and natural disasters of any kind since the beginning of world history.

The revolutionary movement is the greatest scourge that has ever befallen the human species since its appearance on Earth.

The expansion of genocidal violence and the imposition of increasingly suffocating restrictions on human freedom accompany pari passu the spread of the “revolutionary mindset” among broader and broader sections of the population, where entire masses assume the role of avenging judges appointed by the tribunal of the future and grant themselves the right to commit crimes immeasurably greater than those the revolutionary promise claims to extirpate.

Even if we disregard deliberate killings and consider only the revolutionary performance from an economic perspective, no other social or natural cause has ever created as much misery and caused as many deaths from malnutrition as the revolutionary regimes of Russia, China, and several African countries.

Whatever the future of the human species may be and whatever our personal beliefs about it, the “revolutionary mindset” must be radically eradicated from the repertoire of admissible social and cultural possibilities before, by striving too hard to give birth to a supposedly better world, it turns it into a gigantic abortion and the millennia-long journey of the human species on Earth into a meaningless story culminating in a bloody ending.

Although different revolutionary ideologies are all, to a greater or lesser extent, threatening and harmful, their evil does not lie so much in their specific content or the strategies they employ to achieve it, but rather in the fact that they are revolutionary in the sense defined here.

Socialism and Nazism are revolutionary not because they respectively propose the dominance of a class or a race, but because they make these banners the principles of a radical remolding not only of the political order but of all human life. The harms they foreshadow become universally threatening because they do not present themselves as local responses to momentary situations but as universal commandments imbued with the authority to reshape the world according to the mold of a hypothetical future perfection. The Ku Klux Klan is as racist as Nazism, but it is not revolutionary because it has no project of worldwide scope. For this reason, it would be ridiculous to compare it, in terms of danger, to the Nazi movement. It is a purely and simply a police problem.

For this very reason, it is necessary to emphasize that the meaning given here to the term “revolution” is at the same time broader and more precise than the word generally has in historiography and in present social sciences. Many sociopolitical processes usually called “revolutions” are not truly “revolutionary” because they do not partake in the “revolutionary mindset,” they do not aim at the integral remolding of society, culture, and the human species, but are destined solely for the modification of local and momentary situations, ideally for the better. For example, political rebellion aimed only at breaking ties between one country and another is not necessarily revolutionary. Nor is the mere overthrow of a tyrannical regime with the goal of bringing a nation to the freedoms already enjoyed by neighboring peoples. Even if these endeavors employ large-scale military resources and provoke spectacular changes, they are not revolutions because they only seek to correct immediate evils or even return to a previously lost situation.

What unmistakably characterizes the revolutionary movement is that it places the authority of a hypothetical future above the judgment of the entire human species, present or past. Revolution, by its very nature, is totalitarian and universally expansive: there is no aspect of human life it does not seek to subject to its power, no region of the globe to which it does not seek to extend the tentacles of its influence.

Therefore, if several political-military movements of vast proportions must be excluded from the concept of “revolution,” in contrast, several apparently peaceful movements of purely intellectual and cultural nature must be included in it. Their evolution over time leads them to become political powers with pretensions to universally impose new patterns of thought and behavior through bureaucratic, judicial, and police means. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 or the overthrow of Brazilian President João Goulart were not revolutions in any way. Nor was the American independence, a special case that I will have to explain in another article. However, movements like Darwinism and the collection of pseudo-religious phenomena known as the New Age are undoubtedly revolutionary. All these distinctions will have to be explained separately and are being mentioned here just as an example.

Right vs. Left

Among other misconceptions that this study dispels is the one that reigns in the concepts of “left” and “right”. This confusion arises from the fact that this pair of terms is used, in turn, to designate two completely distinct orders of phenomena. On one side, the left represents revolution in general, and the right represents counter-revolution. There seemed to be no doubt about this when the terms were used to designate the two wings of the Estates-General. However, the evolution of events led the revolutionary movement itself to appropriate both terms, using them to designate its internal subdivisions. The Girondins, who were to the left of the king, became the “right” of the revolution, 17 to the extent that, after the king’s beheading, the adherents of the Old Regime were excluded from public life and no longer had the right to a political denomination of their own. This retraction of admissible “rightism,” by labeling one of the factions within the left as “right,” later became a routine mechanism of the revolutionary process. At the same time, genuine counter-revolutionary remnants were often forced to ally with the revolutionary “right” and merge with it to retain some means of action within the framework created by the victory of the revolution. To further complicate matters, once the counter-revolution was excluded from the repertoire of politically admissible ideas, the counter-revolutionary resentment continued to exist as a psychosocial phenomenon and was often used by the revolutionary left as a pretext and rhetorical appeal to win over deeply conservative and traditionalist segments of the population, who were rebelling against the prevailing revolutionary “right” at the time. The MST’s appeal to agrarian nostalgia or the pseudo-traditionalist rhetoric adopted here and there by fascism obscure the strictly revolutionary nature of these movements. Even Mao Zedong was, for some time, considered a traditionalist agrarian reformer. Needless to say, in the internal disputes of the revolutionary movement, the warring factions frequently accused each other of being “right-wing” (or “reactionary”). The Nazi rhetoric that professed to destroy both “reaction” and “communism” corresponded, on the communist side, to the double and successive discourse that first treated the Nazis as primitive and anarchic revolutionaries and later as adherents of the “reaction” committed to “saving capitalism” against the proletarian revolution.

The terms “left” and “right” only have objective meaning when used in their original sense of revolution and counter-revolution, respectively. All other combinations and meanings are occasional arrangements that have no descriptive scope but only an opportunistic utility, serving as symbols of a political movement’s unity and demonizing signs for their objects of hatred.

In the US, the term “right” is used to designate both strict conservatives, who are counter-revolutionaries to the core, and Republican globalists, the “right” of the global revolution. But the confusion existing in Brazil is much worse, where the counter-revolutionary right has no political existence, and the name that designates it is used by the ruling party to label any opposition that comes from within even leftist parties, while the leftist opposition uses it to label the ruling party itself.

To me, it is clear that these terms can only regain some objective descriptive value by taking the revolutionary movement as a whole as the dividing line and opposing it to the counter-revolutionary right, even where the latter has no political expression and is merely a cultural phenomenon.

The essence of the counter-revolutionary or conservative mindset is the aversion to any comprehensive transformation project, the stubborn refusal to intervene in society as a whole, the almost religious respect for regional, spontaneous, and long-term social processes, and the denial of all authority to the spokesmen of the hypothetical future.

In this sense, the author of these lines is strictly conservative. Among other reasons, because he believes that only the conservative point of view can provide a realistic vision of the historical process, as it is based on the experience of the past and not on conjectures of the future. All revolutionary historiography is fraudulent at its core because it interprets and distorts the past according to the mold of a hypothetical and, moreover, indefinable future. It is no coincidence that the greatest historians of all times have always been conservatives.

If, in itself and in the values it defends, the counter-revolutionary mindset should be properly called “conservative,” it is evident that, from the perspective of its relations with the enemy, it is strictly “reactionary.” To be reactionary is to react in the most uncompromising and hostile manner to the diabolical ambition of ruling the world.

Still the revolutionary mindset

Diário do Comércio (editorial), October 10, 2007

In addition to my article from August 16,18 here are some more traits that define the “revolutionary mindset”:

  1. The revolutionary does not perceive injustice and evil as inherent factors of the human condition, which can be mitigated but not eliminated. Instead, they view them as temporary anomalies created by a portion of humanity – the bourgeoisie, Jews, Christians, etc. – that can be identified, punished, and thus eradicate the root of evil.

  2. The guilty portion spreads evil and sin through the exercise of power – economic, political, military, and cultural. Therefore, it must be eliminated through a higher power, the revolutionary power, deliberately created for this purpose.

  3. The malevolent power dominates society as a whole, shaping it according to its interests, goals, and purposes. Eradicating evil must, therefore, take the form of a radical restructuring of the entire social order. Nothing can remain untouched. The revolutionary power, like the God of the Bible, “makes all things new.” There are no limits to the scope and depth of revolutionary action. It can even target the victims of the previous situation, accusing them of becoming accomplices of evil and thus requiring purifying punishment almost as much as the former holders of power.

  4. Although caused by a specific portion of the human species, evil spreads so extensively that it becomes difficult to conceive life without it. The new society of order, justice, and peace can only be envisioned in very general terms since it will be so different from everything that has existed until now. The revolutionary, therefore, is not obligated – nor even capable – of clearly and detailedly outlining the plan for the new society, much less proving its viability or demonstrating the cost-benefit relationship of the transformation. These are given as foundational premises, so the demand for proof is automatically dismissed as a ruse to avoid change and is ipso facto condemned as an element to be eliminated. The revolution is self-founding and cannot be questioned from the outside.

  5. Although known only as a very general and vague image, the future society places itself above all human judgments and becomes the foundational premise for all values, judgments, and reasoning. An immediate consequence of this is that the future, being unable to be rationally conceived, can only be known through its image in present revolutionary action – an action that, for this very reason, eludes any human judgment except that of the revolutionary leaders who embody and personify it. However, even these leaders can represent it imperfectly, as they are offspring of the old society and carry within themselves, at least partially, the seeds of the ancient evil. The intellectual and prophetic authority of revolutionary leaders is therefore provisional and only lasts as long as they have the material power to ensure it. The position of guiding the peoples toward a blissful future is, thus, uncertain and revocable, depending on the irregularities of the revolutionary path. The errors and crimes of the fallen leader cannot be attributed to the future society, the revolutionary process as such, or the movement as a whole. They can only be explained as a residual effect of the condemned past: the revolutionary, by definition, only sins by not being revolutionary enough.

The corporealist illusion

Jornal do Brasil, December 4, 2008

What sets apart the abortionists, gay activists, globalists, Marxists, materialist liberals, and other individuals affected by the “revolutionary mentality” from normal humanity is not a matter of opinion or belief; it is a deeper difference in imaginative and emotional order.

Aristotle already taught—and the experience of 24 centuries never ceases to confirm—that human intelligence does not directly form concepts from objects of sensory perception but from forms preserved in memory and altered by imagination. This means that which escapes the limits of one’s imagination will, for them, be perfectly nonexistent. The imagination, in turn, reflects not only individual dispositions but also the linguistic and symbolic schemes transmitted by culture. Culture has the power to shape the individual imagination, expanding or circumscribing it, making it more luminous or more opaque.

The collective human imagination, for most of human history, was formed by cultural influences that invited people to conceive the physical universe as just one part of the total reality. Beyond the circle of immediate experience, there existed a variety of other possible dimensions, occupying the immeasurable territory between the infinite and the finite, eternity and the passing moment.

As the cultural focus shifted to technology and natural sciences, with the concurrent exclusion of other possible perspectives, it was inevitable that the collective imagination of the masses would become increasingly limited to elements expressible in terms of technological action and available scientific knowledge. Gradually, everything that falls outside these two parameters loses symbolic strength and ends up being reduced to the status of “cultural product” or “belief” with no power to grasp reality. The impoverishment of the imagination is further exacerbated by the growing public devotion to the power of science and technology, the repositories of all hopes and holders, therefore, of all authority. This does not mean that supramaterial dimensions disappear entirely, but they only become accessible to the popular imagination when translated into the language of technology and science symbolism. Hence, the popularity of science fiction, extraterrestrials, and astronaut gods. But, of course, this translation is not a true opening to spiritual dimensions, but merely their caricatural reduction to the language of immediacy and banality.

One consequence of this is that the body, traditionally understood as just one aspect within the structure of individuality, has now become not only its center but also the ultimate limit of its possibilities. Those powers of the human being that only emerge when confronted with the dimension of infinitude and eternity become utterly inaccessible and are explained away as “cultural beliefs” of extinct eras, connoted as backwardness and barbarism. Consequently, even the most heinous achievements of technological society, such as total war and genocide, must be explained, in an entirely irrational and inverted way, as remnants of uncivilized times instead of original creations typical of the new culture. The “opinion maker” of the present day is incapable of perceiving the specific difference between modern totalitarianism and the immeasurably milder forms of tyranny and oppression known in antiquity and the Middle Ages. For him, the Gulag and Auschwitz are the same as the Inquisition.19 When we demonstrate that the extreme forms of individual conduct control were completely unknown everywhere before the 19th century, he feels that discomfort of someone seeing the ground open up beneath their feet. Then he changes the subject immediately or curses us as fundamentalist fanatics.

Ascetics of evil

Leader (Porto Alegre), No. 21, December 25, 2001

As heroes of the revolutionary saga, Che Guevara and Osama bin Laden resemble each other in at least one essential point, in which their self-image is conflated with their public image. I mean that something they fervently believe about themselves coincides with something their audience fervently believes about them. Like all lives of modern revolutionaries, without exception, theirs is essentially composed of personal self-deception transfigured into a world legend by the amplifying effect of propaganda, whether organized propaganda by militant leftists or informal propaganda by sympathetic media.

The personal belief I refer to—and which both have abundantly expressed through actions and words, not being a mere “interpretation” of mine but a simple observation of fact—is as follows: just like the heretics of the sect of the “Free Spirit” studied by Norman Cohn in The Pursuit of the Millennium, both Che and Osama believe themselves so deeply and essentially identified with a supremely just and noble cause that even their most glaring sins and most heinous crimes appear to be redeemed in advance by the unconditional anointing of a legitimizing deity. It matters little whether this deity is, in one case, only informally theological (history, progress, revolution), and explicitly theological in the other. In both cases, there is an appeal to a supreme source of authority that consecrates evil as good.

But it is not that they place themselves above good and evil, in the sense of Nietzsche’s aristocratic amorality of the superman or Gide’s “amoralist.” On the contrary: they have so identified themselves with what they believe is good that even the evil they practice is automatically transfigured, in their eyes, into good. They have finally, in their own eyes, reached the divine stage of essential impeccability.

Thus, in them, total lack of scruples and the habitual practice of criminal violence coexist without major problems with a perfectly sincere faith in their own goodness, even sanctity—implicit in Guevara, ostensive in Osama.

And do not confuse them, please, with the vulgar charlatan, the operetta sanctimonious. He is comic because incompatible traits in him are held together by a very fragile bond of hypocrisy. Deep down, he is aware of his falseness and, caught red-handed, can be unmasked before himself. In the revolutionary hero, existential lies have entirely taken the place of conscience in a kind of ascetic sacrifice. The macabre deity before whose altar this sacrifice is consummated then responds to the petitioner: contrary to the common liar, weakened by the falseness of his position, the ascetic of evil gains double strength with each new abjuration of truth, becoming, at the peak of his spiritual anti-realization, capable of hypnotically projecting his image upon the masses.

Hence, a second similarity: in the paroxysm of idolatrous worship, militants and sympathizers come to see their idols as divine or at least prophetic presences. Expressing a widely disseminated collective conviction nowadays, Frei Betto overtly equated Che Guevara with Jesus Christ, and Arnaldo Jabor called Osama Muhammad II.

The structural lie

Jornal do Brasil, September 27, 2007

When I speak of the “revolutionary mentality,” I am not only referring to those explicitly revolutionary but to a certain structure of perception that can be present in individuals unrelated to political activity. One of its characteristic features is pseudo-prophetism: the subject imagines himself the bearer of a new world—which can be a new scientific, artistic, moral, religious, or political world, or all of these at the same time—and becomes so intoxicated by the vision of this brilliant future that his perception of the present life becomes distorted, grotesque, and, in the most radical and absolute sense, false.

The lie and pretense, which normal humanity uses as occasional and momentary expedients, become in the revolutionary the constant basis of his self-image and the universe. I would use the word “hysteria” to describe this scenario if it were not compatible with an apparently normal external behavior in everything outside the individual’s specific area of activity. When René Descartes, in the Meditations on First Philosophy, confuses his concrete temporal self with the universal idea of the knowing self, and moves from one to the other without realizing that he takes logical analysis of an abstract concept as autobiographical narrative, this is evidently a hysterical symptom, although in daily life, the philosopher does not show the slightest sign of hysteria. Perhaps “intellectual hysteria” is the term. And hysteria means being carried away by one’s own pretense to the point of wholeheartedly believing in it.

In the political revolutionary, pretense therefore plays a completely different role than it does in normal politicians. The latter lie when it suits them, with the necessary caution to maintain a reasonable control of their own performance. Their lies are conscious and calculated, compatible with the thickest and healthiest realism. The revolutionary, as he measures present life with the ruler of the wonderful future he imagines personifying, simply cannot see things as they are. He must falsify everything so that the hypothetical merits of the promised society are taken as the current virtues of his own person and his party.

The lie of the ordinary politician is instrumental and punctual, that of the revolutionary is structural, permanent, and expansive: unable to consciously dose lie and truth, he must destroy in the public itself the ability to make this distinction. Hence, the “cultural revolution,” the systematic dismantling of popular intelligence.

When Mr. Luiz Inácio20 poses as a tough nationalist by proclaiming that “the Amazon has an owner” and a few hours later opens the Amazonian territory to international greed as if announcing a real estate development, the contrast is so ostentatious, so obviously scandalous that the hypothesis of instrumental pretense must be discarded in limine. Mr. Luiz Inácio is not stupid enough to think that he can deceive anyone with such an obvious lie. But he is crazy enough to deceive himself with it, believing that surrendering to foreign interests, if practiced by an authorized representative of the beatific future, instantly becomes a kind of love for the homeland. Transfigured by pseudo-prophetism, the contradiction turns into identity, and honny soit qui mal y pense.

Far from concealing the abyss between his words and his actions, the revolutionary exhibits it with a stupefying candor that disarms the spectator. He does not really want to deceive the public. He wants to stupefy it so that it lives in a state of permanent deception, just like he does.

4. Society x guilt

Straight from hell

From the Newspaper “Jornal da Tarde,” April 13, 2000

The obsessive clamor of intellectuals, politicians, and the media for the “elimination of inequalities” and a “fairer society” may not produce any of these two results, even in the long run, or anything resembling them. But immediately, it produces at least one infallible outcome: it makes people believe that the dominance of justice and goodness depends on society, the State, the laws, and not on themselves. The more we are outraged by the “unjust society,” the more our personal sins seem to dissolve in the general iniquity and lose all significance.

What is a single lie, a casual betrayal, a singular disloyalty amidst the universal wickedness that newspapers describe and demagogues denounce in fiery speeches from the top of platforms? It is a drop of water in the ocean, a grain of sand in the desert, a wandering particle among galaxies, an infinitesimal before the infinite. No one will notice. Let us sin, then, with a clear conscience, and let us speak against the world’s evil.

Let us eliminate from our hearts any feeling of guilt, expelling it onto institutions, laws, unjust income distribution, high interest rates, and heinous privatizations.

There is only one problem: if everyone thinks this way, evil multiplies by the number of words condemning it. And the more malicious each person becomes, the more indignation against the generic and unattributed evil inflames the hearts of all.

One must be blind, an idiot, or completely detached from reality not to notice that, in the history of recent centuries, and especially in the last decades, the expansion of social ideals and revolt against the “unjust society” come hand in hand with the lowering of individuals' moral standards and the consequent multiplication of their crimes. And one must have a monstrously prejudiced mindset to refuse to see the causal connection that links the moral dismissal of individuals to an ethics that invites them to relieve themselves of guilt by casting it onto the back of an abstract universal entity, “society.”

If such an obvious connection eludes the examiners, and they get lost in the evasive conjecture of a thousand and one other possible causes, it is for a very simple reason: the class that promotes the ethics of personal irresponsibility and the blaming of generalities is the same class responsible for examining society and reporting what is happening. The inquiry is conducted by the criminal. It is the intellectuals who first dissolve the sense of moral values, pit children against their parents, flatter individual wickedness, and turn every delinquent into a victim entitled to receive compensations from the evil society, and then, contemplating the panorama of general delinquency resulting from the assimilation of new values, they refuse to take responsibility for the effects of their words. Thus, they must resort to increasingly artificial subterfuges to maintain a pose of impartial and scientifically reliable authorities.

Social scientists, psychologists, journalists, writers, the “talking classes,” as Pierre Bourdieu calls them, are not the neutral and distant witnesses they like to appear in public (even when they confess to being social reformers or revolutionaries in private). They are the driving forces of social transformation, the most powerful and effective ones, the only ones that have a direct impact on the imagination, feelings, and behavior of the masses. Whatever degrades and decays in social life may have hundreds of other concurrent, predisposing, associated, remote, and indirect causes; but its immediate and decisive cause is the overwhelming and omnipresent influence of the “talking classes.”

Weakening individuals' moral consciousness under the pretext of reforming society is to become the intellectual mastermind behind all crimes—and then, with redoubled cynicism, to erase all traces. The guilt of activist intellectuals in the degradation of social life, the dehumanization of personal relationships, and the production of rampant criminality is, in its overall effect, boundless and incalculable. Perhaps it is because they have soiled themselves so much that their accusations against society have that deep and terrifying resonance that lends them an appearance of credibility before the naive audience. No one speaks with greater force and authority against the sinner than the demon who induced them to sin. The discourse of activist intellectuals against society comes straight from the last circle of Hell.

The formula to drive the world mad

Diário do Comércio, June 11, 2007

Adam Smith observes that in every society, two moral systems coexist: one, rigidly conservative for the poor, and another, flexible and permissive for the rich and elegant. History abundantly confirms this generalization, but we can still extract much substance from it that did not exist in Adam Smith’s time.

What happened was that the advent of modern democracy significantly altered the coexistence between these two codes. First, it elevated the moral standards of the poor to the ruling class: in 19th-century America, we witnessed the emergence, for the first time in history, of a caste of rulers willing to be judged by the same rules applicable to the rest of the population. In the following century, the proportions reversed: permissiveness not only reestablished itself among the chic class but also descended and contaminated the masses. It is true that this transformation was not complete: half of the American nation still comprehends and judges itself according to the precepts of the Bible. However, the effects of the “sexual revolution” were profound, spreading permissiveness and debauchery far beyond the sexual sphere. The Clinton episode, forgiven by the parliament after using the Oval Office of the White House as a motel room, shows that for a large portion of the public opinion, even the appearance of morality has become dispensable. A brief examination of teenage pregnancy and drug use statistics shows that a similar transformation occurred in the countries of Western Europe, where the dissolution of customs had been underway since the end of World War I.21

The consequences of this transformation extend far beyond the “moral” domain. As E. Michael Jones has been demonstrating in a memorable series of studies,^994 this is precisely where we must seek the cause of the success of totalitarian ideologies in the 20th century. By combining his diagnosis with that of Gertrude Himmelfarb,22 we can arrive at some very illuminating conclusions.

The poet Stephen Spender, after breaking with the Communist Party, had already admitted that what led Western intellectuals to be passionate about ideologies contrary to their own freedom was the feeling of guilt and the desire to get rid of it at a low price. The origin of this guilt lies in the fact that broad sections of the middle class began to enjoy practically unlimited leisure and pleasures without having to bear the political, military, and religious responsibilities for which the ancient aristocracy paid the moral price of their sexual and alcoholic excesses. At a time when France was the most Christian country in Europe, Louis XIV had no less than 28 lovers, but his work routine was heavier than that of any multinational executive, not to mention the fact, so brilliantly emphasized by René Girard,23 that the royal function carried with it the obligation to serve as a scapegoat for the nation’s ills: when Louis XVI’s head rolled as payment for the debts of his father and grandfather, it was not a revolutionary innovation but simply the fulfillment of an implicit agreement at the core of the monarchical system. Even in the Middle Ages, the burden of territorial defense fell entirely on the aristocratic class: no one could compel a peasant or merchant to go to war, but a nobleman who shirked his military duties would be instantly executed by his peers. Noblesse oblige: the aristocratic class was relieved of part of the Christian moral rigors in proportion to the degree it paid for its freedom with the constant offer of its own life in sacrifice for the good of all.

The democratization of permissiveness spreads the rights of the aristocracy to a multitude of newcomers who suddenly find themselves freed from religious pressure without having to assume any extra responsibilities, however minimal, capable of restoring the balance between rights and duties. On the contrary, with freedom comes access to countless goods and a standard of living that is even superior to that of the old aristocracy—all of this on a silver platter.

In his classic 1928 work, The Revolt of the Masses, Ortega y Gasset noted that the typical representative of the modern middle class, the “mass man,” was actually a spoiled child, a señorito satisfecho, who considered himself the rightful heir to all the benefits of modern civilization for which he had contributed absolutely nothing, for which he had to pay nothing, and about which, generally, he knew nothing regarding the sacrifices that had produced them.

Everywhere in previous civilizations, a certain balance between cost and benefit, rights and duties, pleasures and sacrifices, was recognized as the central principle of human sanity. The release of immense masses of population to enjoy pleasures and gratuitous luxuries is one of the most threatening psychological situations humanity has ever experienced since the time of caves. For each individual engulfed in this process, the most direct and unavoidable effect of the experience is a feeling of guilt, deeper and more overwhelming, the less conscious it is. But how could it be conscious if, to the same extent that the doors of pleasure open, the doors of religious consciousness close?

The señorito satisfecho is corroded by a deep self-hatred, but he is forbidden, by the prevailing culture, from perceiving the true nature of his guilt, and even more so from alleviating it through religious confession and the fulfillment of penitential duties. The poorly conscious guilt, as psychoanalysis has demonstrated time and again, always ends up being externalized as persecutory and accusatory fantasies projected onto others, onto “the world,” onto “the system.” The moderately educated man of our time projects his guilt onto “the system,” pretending to himself that he is revolted by what it denies to the poor, when in reality he hates it for what the system gives him without requiring anything in return. Not that the system is free of guilt; but the same general prosperity, which spreads the benefits of civilization among growing masses who could never dream of it in previous centuries, shows that these guilt feelings are not of an economic nature but rather cultural: capitalism does not create poverty but wealth; yet, along with it, it spreads secularism and permissiveness, disrupting the balance between pleasure and sacrifice, a basic need of the human psyche. Hence the apparent paradox that the hatred of the system spreads mainly—or exclusively—among the classes that benefit most materially from it (recall what I said about the gay movement in the article “Consequences more than foreseeable”).24

The socialist temptation appears as the easiest channel through which the guilt of the spoiled child is thrown precisely onto the sources of his well-being and freedom. Look at the youngsters from USP, people from the middle and upper class, vandalizing a tuition-free university, and you will understand what I am talking about: what these young people need is not more benefits; they need a moral demand that restores their sanity. However, since the representatives of the State are themselves señoritos satisfechos who also do not understand the origin of their own guilt, their tendency is to turn the enraged youth into a symbol of their own missing moral conscience; hence, they yield everything to them as a semblance of penance, corrupting them and corrupting themselves more and more, and precipitating an accumulation of guilt that can only culminate in the supreme guilt of revolutionary bloodshed.

“We live in a mad world, and we know it perfectly well,” said Jan Huizinga in the 1930s, shortly before the unbalance of the European soul culminated in general slaughter. Almost eight decades later, Western humanity has learned nothing from the experience and is ready to repeat it. Hypnotized by the logic of desire, which sees no cure for its woes other than seeking more satisfactions and more freedom, how could it discover that its problem is not a lack of goods or pleasures but a lack of duties and sacrifices that would restore the meaning of life and the integrity of the soul?

Needless to say, the adherence to the revolutionary and socialist ersatz, being at its core a neurotic farce, does not relieve guilt in any way but rather represses it even deeper into the unconscious, where it becomes all the more explosive and lethal, concealed behind a discourse of ideological self-beatification (Marilena Chauí dreamed of “living without guilt”; Mr. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva modestly admits to having achieved this ideal). Hatred towards the system—with its most typical expression today being anti-Americanism—grows in direct proportion to the self-indulgent illusion of pure intentions, which leads each individual to become more deeply involved in complicity with corruption and crimes of the revolutionary party. The capitalists, the representatives of the “system,” in turn, passively accept being objects of hatred and even rejoice in it, vainly hoping to thereby cleanse their own guilt. However, since this guilt does not reside where the revolutionary discourse points, each new concession to leftist clamor makes them even more guilty and vulnerable.

Anticipating Jones and Himmelfarb’s analyses, Igor Caruso25 located the origin of neuroses not in the repression of sexual desire but in the rejection of the appeals of moral conscience. The abandonment of guilt consciousness can only result in the proliferation of unconscious guilt. And unconscious guilt requires new and new scapegoats, whose sacrifice only makes them even more distressing and intolerable.

Just society

Diário do Comércio, March 10, 2011

The other day, they asked me about my concept of a just society. The word “concept” came with an American and pragmatic sense, rather than a Greco-Latin one. Instead of merely designating the verbal formula of an essence or being, it meant the mental scheme of a plan to be accomplished. In that sense, clearly, I had no concept of a just society, because I was convinced that it was not up to me to bring such a marvelous thing into the world, and it also didn’t seem profitable to me to invent plans that I had no intention of realizing.

What was within my reach, instead, was just to analyze the very idea of a “just society” — its concept in the Greco-Latin sense of the term — to see if it made sense and if it had any usefulness.

First and foremost, the attributes of justice and injustice only apply to real entities capable of acting. A human being can act, a company can act, a political group can act, but “society” as a whole cannot. Every action presupposes the unity of intention that determines it, and no society ever achieves a unity of intentions that justifies pointing it out as a concrete subject of a specific action. Society, as such, is not an agent: it is the ground, the framework where the actions of thousands of agents, driven by diverse intentions, produce results that do not entirely correspond to their intentions, let alone those of a generic entity called “society”!

Therefore, a “just society” is not a descriptive concept. It is a figure of speech, a metonymy. For this reason, it necessarily has a multiplicity of meanings that overlap and merge into an indistinguishable confusion, which is enough to explain why the greatest crimes and injustices in the world have been committed precisely in the name of a “just society.” When you adopt a figure of speech as the goal of your actions, imagining it as a concept, that is, when you set out to accomplish something that you cannot even define, it is inevitable that you will end up achieving something entirely different from what you envisioned. When this happens, there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, but most of the time, the troublemaker avoids taking responsibility, clinging stubbornly like a crab to an assertion of good intentions that, precisely because they do not correspond to any identifiable reality, serve as the best analgesic for undemanding consciences.

If society itself cannot be just or unjust, every society encompasses a variety of conscious agents who can perform just or unjust actions. If the expression “just society” can have any substantive meaning, it is that of a society where different agents have the means and the willingness to help each other avoid unjust acts or to rectify them when they could not be prevented. Ultimately, “just society” simply means a society where the pursuit of justice is possible. “Means” means: power. Certainly, legal power, but not only that: if you do not have the economic, political, and cultural means to enforce justice, the law being on your side will be of little use. For there to be that minimum of justice without which the expression “just society” would be nothing but a beautiful adornment of nefarious crimes, there must be a certain variety and abundance of means of power spread throughout the population instead of concentrated in the hands of an enlightened or lucky elite. However, if the population itself is not capable of creating these means and instead trusts in a revolutionary group that promises to take them from their current holders and distribute them democratically, then the realm of injustice will be definitively established. To distribute powers, one must first possess them: the future distributor of powers must first become the monopolistic holder of all power. And even if he later attempts to fulfill his promise, the mere condition of being a distributor of powers will increasingly make him the absolute ruler of supreme power.

Powers, means of action, cannot be taken, given, or borrowed: they must be created. Otherwise, they are not powers: they are symbols of power, used to mask the lack of effective power. Whoever does not have the power to create means of power will always, at best, be the slave of the donor or distributor.

To the extent that the expression “just society” can transmute from a figure of speech into a viable descriptive concept, it becomes clear that a reality corresponding to this concept can only exist as the work of a people endowed with initiative and creativity — a people whose actions and enterprises are varied, novel, and creative enough to resist control by any elite, whether accommodating oligarchs or power-hungry revolutionaries.

He who sincerely wishes to liberate his people from the yoke of a ruling elite never promises to take power from that elite and distribute it to the people: instead, he seeks to unleash the latent creative forces in the spirit of the people, so that they may learn to generate their own means of power — many, varied, and unpredictable — undermining and diluting the plans of the elite — any elite — before they can even comprehend what has happened.

General rule

Diário do Comércio, November 13, 2012

If you have not noticed yet, take advantage of the festival of homicides in São Paulo as a perfect occasion to note this general rule that is never contradicted: with the same constancy with which in any agrarian and backward nation, socialist revolutions immediately result in the establishment of genocidal dictatorships, in any more or less prosperous and democratic country where the left becomes hegemonic, crime rates rise and continue to rise. The first of these phenomena was observed in Russia, China, North Korea, Cambodia, Cuba, etc. The second, in France, England, Argentina, Venezuela, the USA, Brazil, and a little bit everywhere in the West.

Why? And is there any relationship between these two series of facts?

The whole socialist scheme is based on Karl Marx’s idea that the industrial proletariat is the revolutionary class par excellence, separated from the bourgeoisie by an irreconcilable contradiction between their respective interests.

When a revolutionary party takes power in a backward, predominantly agrarian nation, like Russia in 1917 and China in 1949, it does not find a sufficiently numerous proletarian class to serve as a base for transforming society. The remedy is to appeal to forced industrialization to create a proletariat overnight and “develop the productive forces” to the breaking point where the bourgeoisie becomes unnecessary and can be replaced by proletarian administrators. For this, it is necessary to establish a totalitarian dictatorship that can control and rearrange the workforce at its whim (Trotsky called this “militarization of labor”). Hence the similarity in methods between socialist revolutionary and fascist regimes: both prioritize forced industrialization, with the only difference being that fascists desire it for nationalist reasons, and socialists crave it for the desire of world revolution.

When the revolutionary left comes to power through electoral means in a more or less democratic and developed nation, it finds a numerous and sometimes even organized proletariat. But it is a proletariat that no longer serves as a revolutionary class because the evolution of capitalism, instead of impoverishing and marginalizing it as Marx predicted, has remarkably raised its standard of living and integrated it into society as a new middle class, indifferent or hostile to the proposal of revolutions. To avoid social isolation and political inefficacy, revolutionaries have to find some other social group whose conflict of interests with the rest of society can be exploited. However, there is no group that has such a direct and clear economic antagonism with the bourgeoisie, nor such an evident revolutionary potential as Karl Marx imagined he saw in the proletariat. With no pure and ready “revolutionary class,” the remedy is to try to form one by joining heterogeneous groups driven by diverse dissatisfactions.

From then on, any complaints, no matter how subjective, crazy, or conflicting they may be, will be used as ferment for the revolutionary spirit. The price is the complete dissolution of the theoretical unity of the movement, forced to accommodate the most varied and mutually incompatible interests within it. Drug traffickers thirsty for wealth and power, thieves, murderers, and swindlers revolted against the penal system, millionaires eager for political (or even intellectual) prestige commensurate with their bank account, mediocre teachers anxious to become moral guides to the masses, dissatisfied middle-class housewives with domestic routine, students, and small intellectuals indignant with a society that does not reward their imaginary merits, newly arrived immigrants demanding their share of wealth they did not help build, people discontent with the sex they were born into — all now march side by side with expelled farmers, unemployed heads of families, and racially discriminated minorities, mixing real and supposed damages, objective and subjective, that they all believe they have suffered and placing the blame on a target as omnipresent as it is intangible: the “system” or “unjust society.”

Since it is obviously impossible to unify all these interests into a coherent and elegant ideological construction like classical Marxism, the solution is to resort to something like the “critical theory” of the Frankfurt School, which assigns to the revolutionary intellectual the unique mission of criticizing, denouncing, corroding, and destroying everything, focusing on the “work of the negative,” as Hegel called it, without ever worrying about what will replace the present evils. Mr. Lula never studied critical theory, but he echoed the chatter of the intellectuals around him when, after several years in office and two decades as the absolute leader of the São Paulo Forum, he confessed: “We still do not know what kind of socialism we want.” We do not know, and we do not need to know: the only thing that matters is to move forward — “forward,” as in Barack Hussein Obama’s campaign motto —, accusing, incriminating, and generating more and more confusion, which will then inevitably be attributed to the “unjust society.”

If in the intellectual sphere, this attitude has even led to the radical denial of logic and the objectivity of language, condemning the simple requirement of truth as authoritarian, how could it not arouse, in the field of social morality, an unprecedented flourishing of cynical amorality and rampant criminality?

5. Capitalists x revolutionaries

Capitalism and Christianity

Republic, December 1998

A notable fallacy circulating in the criticism against the evils of capitalism is the identification of the modern capitalist with the medieval usurer, who enriched himself through the impoverishment of others.

This common cliché in socialist rhetoric, however, was an authentic creation of that entity which, for the supreme guru Antonio Gramsci, was the number one enemy of the proletarian revolution: the Catholic Church.26

Since the 18th century, and increasingly during the 19th century, precisely in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, the popes have not ceased to condemn economic liberalism as a system founded on the selfishness of the few who profit from the misery of many.

However, the idea that the rich become richer at the expense of the poor is only possible in the framework of a static economy, where a more or less fixed amount of goods and services has to be divided like a birthday cake that, once taken out of the oven, does not grow anymore. In a tribe of Indian fishermen from the Upper Xingu, the “concentration of capital” would be equivalent to an Indian taking the majority of the fish for himself, either with the intention of consuming them or lending them at interest, one fish in exchange for two or three. In such conditions, the fewer fish remained for the other citizens of the tribe, the more these poor unfortunates would be indebted to the accursed Indian capitalist—the man in loincloth who leaves others in the lurch.

It was based on an analogy of this kind that, in the 13th century, Saint Thomas Aquinas rightly condemned usury as an attempt to gain something for nothing. In a static economy like the feudal order, or even more so in Aristotle’s slave society, money did not function as a productive force, but merely as a certificate of the right to a certain generic quantity of goods that, if going into one person’s pocket, came out of another’s. In that context, the concentration of money in the hands of the usurer only served to give him increasingly effective means to exploit others.

However, at least from the 18th century onwards, and especially in the 19th century, the European world was already living in a rapidly developing economy where the function of money had changed radically, and no pope showed the slightest sign of perceiving it. In the new framework, nobody could hoard money under the mattress to fondle it in the early morning hours with fetishistic delight, but had to invest it quickly in the overall growth of the economy before inflation turned it into dust. If someone were to foolishly invest in the impoverishment of anyone, they would be investing in their own bankruptcy.

Saint Thomas, always marvelously sensible, had distinguished between investment and lending, stating that profit was only legitimate in the former case because it involved participation in the business, with the risk of loss, while the lender, who merely sat and waited in safety, should only have the right to the repayment of the amount lent, not a penny more. In the 13th-century economy, this was obvious—something that everyone could see once a wise man showed that it existed. However, in the context of the capitalist economy, even the pure loan without apparent risk no longer worked as before. But even the bankers, who experienced this change in their daily lives and actually lived it, were unable to explain to the world what it consisted of. They noticed, in practice, that interest-bearing loans were useful and essential for economic development, so they must have been something good. However, not being able to theoretically formulate the difference between this practice and that of the medieval usurer, they could only see themselves as usurers condemned by Catholic morality. The inability to reconcile moral good and practical usefulness then became the professional vice of the capitalist, infecting all liberal ideology (to this day, every argument in favor of capitalism sounds like the admonition of a realistic and cold adult against the quixotic idealism of youth). Karl Marx sought to explain liberal dualism by the fact that the capitalist stayed in the office, dealing with numbers and abstractions, far from the machines and the material—as if physical exertion helped to solve a logical contradiction, and also as if Karl Marx himself had ever carried anything heavier than a pen or a cigar. More recently, our Roberto Mangabeira Unger, the most intelligent leftist on the planet, and who is only not fully intelligent because he remains a leftist, made a devastating critique of liberal ideology based on the analysis of the ethical (and cognitive, as seen in Kant) dualism that is the root of contemporary schizophrenia.

However, this dualism was not inherent to capitalism as such, but rather the result of the conflict between the demands of the new economy and a Christian moral rule created for an economy that no longer existed. The only person who understood and theorized about what was happening was a citizen with no religious authority or prestige in the Church: the Austrian economist Eugen Böhm-Bawerk. This poorly recognized genius noticed that, in the context of growing capitalism, the remuneration of loans was not just an amoral practical convenience but a legitimate moral requirement. When lending, the banker simply exchanged actual money, equivalent to a calculable share of goods at the time of the loan, for future money that, in a changing economy, could be worth more or less at the time of repayment. From a functional point of view, there was no longer any positive difference between a loan and a risky investment. Therefore, the remuneration was just as fair in the former case as it was in the latter, especially as political liberalism, by banishing the old penalty of debt imprisonment, left the banker without the maximum extortion tool of the ancient usurers.

A disciple of Böhm-Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises, explained this difference in more detail through the intervention of the factor time in the economic relationship: the lender exchanges current money for potential money and can do so precisely because, having concentrated capital, they are capable of deferring the expenditure of that money, which the borrower needs to spend immediately to carry on with their business or personal life. Von Mises was perhaps the most philosophical economist who ever existed, but, still somewhat muddled by some remnants of Kantianism, he did not seem to realize for a moment that he was reasoning in rigorously Aristotelian-Scholastic terms: the right to remuneration comes from the fact that the banker is not merely exchanging one wealth for another, but is exchanging wealth in act for wealth in potency, which would be sheer madness if the banking system as a whole were not betting on the overall growth of the economy, but only on the enrichment of the class of bankers. The concentration of capital for financing banking operations is not, therefore, a harm that can only produce something good if subjected to external “social purposes” (and policed in their name), but is, in itself and by itself, socially useful and morally legitimate.

Saint Thomas, if he were to read this argument, would have no objection and would certainly see in it a good reason for the full and unconditional reintegration of modern capitalism into Catholic morality. However, Saint Thomas was already in heaven, and in the earthly Vatican, no one has shown any sign of having read Böhm-Bawerk or von Mises to this day. Hence the gross contradiction in the Church’s social doctrines, which, while outwardly celebrating economic initiative, continue to condemn liberal capitalism as a system based on selfish individualism, ultimately favoring socialism, which thanks to this collaboration institutes, as soon as it comes to power, the systematic persecution and killing of Christians, that is, what Dr. Leonardo Boff, referring particularly to Cuba, called “the Kingdom of God on Earth.” Hence, also, the financial capitalist (and even, by contamination, the industrialist), if they still had any Christian beliefs, continued to suffer from a false guilty conscience that could only be relieved by adhering to the artificial Protestant ideology of “worldly asceticism” (accumulating money to go to heaven), which no one can take literally seriously, or by the even more artificial expedient of making majestic money donations to socialist demagogues, who, although atheist or at most deist, effectively use Catholic morality as an instrument of psychological blackmail, and they are even helped in this—alas!—by the letter and spirit of various papal encyclicals.

One of the causes that led to the tragic Catholic error in evaluating 19th-century capitalism was the trauma of the French Revolution, which, by robbing and selling the Church’s property at a low price, enriched thousands of infamous and greedy arrivistes overnight, who established the empire of cynical amorality, the wild capitalism so well described in the works of Honoré de Balzac. Did this revolutionary looting represent the capitalist procedure par excellence? If it did, France would have evolved towards liberal capitalism and not towards the paralyzing state interventionism that left it forever behind England and the United States in the race for modernity. An authoritarian government that tramples upon the properties of its adversaries to distribute them to its cronies is anything but liberal-capitalist; it is, in fact, interventionist progressivism, in which, by supreme irony, the Church still seeks to see a remedy against the supposed evils of liberal capitalism, which, where it came into existence—England and the United States—never harmed it or anything but helped it, even in the dark hour of persecution and martyrdom suffered at the hands of communists and other statist progressives, like the revolutionaries in Mexico who inaugurated the season of hunting down priests in the Americas. The French case, if it proves anything, is that “wild capitalism” flourishes in the shadow of state interventionism, not in a liberal regime (a fact again proven, this time, by Brazilian bureaucracy). By insisting on saying the opposite, moved by the untimely application of a Thomistic principle and seeing in the French statism the liberal capitalism that was its opposite, the Church did what those suspense movie heroines do, who, fleeing from the villain, ask for a lift from a truck… driven by the villain himself. The inability to discern friends from enemies, the despair that leads the sinner to seek spiritual assistance from Satan, are unmistakable marks of moral stupidity, intolerable in the institution that Christ himself designated as the mother and teacher of humanity. Errare humanum est, perseverare diabolicum: the Church’s obstinacy in its reservations against liberal capitalism and its consequent complicity with socialism is perhaps the longest-lasting case of collective blindness ever noted throughout human history. And when, in the 19th century, the Pope, already besieged by challenges within the Church itself, proclaims his own infallibility in matters of morality and doctrine, this can only be perhaps an unconscious psychological compensation for his persistent fallibility in economic and political matters. Hence, the “Metz Pact,” in which the Church knelt at the feet of communism without demanding anything in return, was just one step away. By confessing that, with the last Council, “the smoke of Satan had entered the Vatican windows,” Pope Paul VI forgot to observe that this could only have happened because someone from within had left the windows open.

No Christian soul can resist such a huge paradox without having its faith shaken. It has been and is the main cause of apostasy, the greatest scandal and stumbling block ever placed on the path of salvation throughout the history of the Church.

To remove this hypnotic suggestion from our souls, to restore the consciousness that capitalism, with all its disadvantages and outside any supposedly corrective state intervention, is in itself and essentially more Christian than the most beautiful of socialisms, is the first duty of liberal intellectuals who do not want to collaborate with the farcical leftist monopoly of morality, trading their souls for the plate of amoral efficiency.

Good and evil according to Olívio Dutra

April 7, 2000

An entrepreneur is someone who makes a living by organizing economic activities. They accumulate capital, invest, earn, pay their debts to suppliers, employees, and the State, and in the end, if all goes well, they make a profit. Almost all of the profit is reinvested in the same or other businesses. A tiny portion can be spent for their own benefit and that of their family. If their business is very, very prosperous, even this tiny portion is enough for them to buy mansions, yachts, private jets, luxury cars, racehorses, and, if they wish, have multiple lovers. In general, they settle for much less.

A left-wing politician is someone who makes a living by trying to pit employees against employers. They show the workers the airplanes, racehorses, and luxury cars of the boss and shout, “It’s robbery!” In the beginning, they do it for free. It’s an investment. Just as the entrepreneur invests money, they invest insults, gestures, indignant expressions, and appeals for the guillotine. In return, people give them money. They live off of that. When they achieve success, they can afford mansions, yachts, private jets, luxury cars, racehorses, and lovers in no smaller quantity than the most prosperous capitalist.

Both the entrepreneur’s and the left-wing politician’s activities can be carried out in an honest or dishonest manner. The entrepreneur can cheat their suppliers, sell fraudulent products, withhold payment due to the workers, or they can pay everything properly and sell good products. Similarly, the left-wing politician can embezzle public money, improperly use State properties, and terrorize household maids as Mao Zedong did. Or they can do everything within the law they established and be as incorruptible as Robespierre.

The difference is as follows: from the entrepreneur’s activity, even the most dishonest, there always result an activation of the economy, an increase in productivity, and an expansion of jobs. These results may come in large or small quantities, but they must necessarily come, for the simple reason that “enterprise” consists of producing them and nothing else.

From the left-wing politician’s activity, even the most honest, there always result an increase in hatred between classes, the growth of the state apparatus that will have to be sustained, by standards, with money extracted from employees and consumers, the general politicization of language, which will turn all debates into clashes of force, and ultimately, it will lead to a redeeming bloodbath. These results may also come in large or small quantities, but they will inevitably come, because “left-wing politics” consists of producing them and nothing else.

An entrepreneur, honest or dishonest, is at the height of success when they can, without harming their investments, buy mansions, yachts, luxury cars, private jets, etc. They achieve this when they become a mega-entrepreneur. To reach this point, they must leave behind factories, banks, plantations, newspapers, TV channels, and a thousand other businesses that support and thrive from thousands of people.

A left-wing politician, honest or dishonest, is at the height of success when they have destroyed all opposition to their ideas and lead a society faithfully willing to carry them out. They achieve this when they become the leader of a victorious revolution. To reach this point, they must leave behind thousands or millions of corpses, destroyed buildings, burnt plantations, wandering orphans and widows, hunger, misery, and despair.

Governor Olívio Dutra believes that being an entrepreneur is immoral and being a left-wing politician is beautiful.

He lacks the intellectual maturity to realize that the final success of an entrepreneur, even if dishonest, always brings more good than harm, and that the final success of a left-wing politician, even if inflexibly honest like him, produces an amount of evil greater than any good could ever repair.

Governor Olívio Dutra, like any other left-wing politician, has a moral conscience distorted by a false use of language. He heard in childhood: “selfish profit,” “social justice,” and has become so impregnated with these verbal symbols of evil and good that he put his life at the service of what seems to him a noble cause: to combat things that have ugly names and praise those that have beautiful names. Something that created the most prosperous and free nations on Earth must be very bad because it has the heinous name of “selfish profit.” Something that killed a hundred million scapegoats and reduced a billion and a half other innocent people to slavery and misery must be excellent because it bears the beautiful name of “social justice.”

Breaking the magical unity of names and things is a painful operation. It costs shames and humiliations to the proud mind. But it is the price of maturity. In the judgment of a mature man — the spoudaios — according to Aristotle, lies the only hope for a just government, of the predominance, even if relative and precarious, of good over evil. There is no good where there is no love for truth, and there is no love for truth where a stubborn mind clings to the childish instinct of judging things by the names they bear.

The problem of Governor Olívio Dutra, as well as of thousands who think like him, was diagnosed by Jesus Christ two millennia ago: “Truly, you love what you should hate and hate what you should love.” They sinned against the spirit, protecting themselves behind beautiful words from seeing ugly realities, and received as punishment exactly what they asked for: forced blindness became spontaneous, and today their inverted morality seems to them the most natural attitude in the world, the only possible way to judge things — the path of good, outside of which everything is perdition and “selfish profit.”

I don’t even believe it’s worth praying for them to awaken. They will not awaken until they send millions of human beings to eternal sleep.

Money and power

Jornal da Tarde, September 16, 1999

Every time I hear a left-wing politician denounce the capitalist greed in a prophetic tone, I wonder if they truly believe that the yearning for power is morally superior to the desire for money, or if they simply pretend to believe it to present themselves as saints. Obviously, there is no third alternative. No left-wing activist wants to make a revolution just to go home and live as an obscure common citizen of the socialist republic; each one of them is, by definition, a potential holder of a slice of power in the future State. This is the only difference between a party’s militant and a simple voter. When assuming the revolutionary struggle, the least a person expects is a position as a people’s commissioner. After all, it would make no sense that, after taking on the responsibility of an active leader in the destruction of capitalism, they give less of themselves to the “construction of socialism.” (The same, of course, applies mutatis mutandis to the followers of fascism or any other proposal for radical change in society. I emphasize socialism simply because there is no mass movement of fascist inspiration in Brazil today.)

Therefore, all revolutionary activism is inseparable from the eagerness for power, and it takes blatant effrontery or pathological unawareness not to realize that this passion is infinitely more destructive than the desire for wealth. Wealth, no matter how much financiers' abstractions try to relativize it, always has a material foundation — houses, food, clothing, utensils — which makes it a concrete thing, a visible good that is valuable in itself, regardless of the surrounding opulence or poverty. On the other hand, power, as Nietzsche saw it, is nothing if not more power. This is the most obvious thing in the world: no matter how mediated by social relations, wealth is ultimately dominion over things. Power is dominion over people. A wealthy person does not become poor when their neighbors also become rich, but power that is matched by other powers is automatically canceled. Wealth develops through the accumulation of goods, while power, in essence, does not increase by expanding its means but by suppressing the means of action of other people. To establish a police state, it is not necessary to give the police more weapons; it is enough to take them away from citizens. The dictator does not become a dictator by claiming new rights but by suppressing the old rights of the people.

Human intelligence had to descend to an almost unnatural level for a philosophy — or something like that — to invert such an obvious equation, seeing poverty as the foundation of wealth and political power as the creative instrument of equality.

The most characteristic phenomenon of the 20th century, totalitarianism, was not a deviation or an accident on the path of the democratic dream: it was the inescapable consequence of a suicidal bet on the moral superiority of political power and its egalitarian social mission. The result of this bet is evident for all to see. The promised economic equality did not come, but, in return, the difference in means of action between governed and governors grew to a point that even the most ambitious tyrants of antiquity did not dare to dream of. Julius Caesar, Attila, or Genghis Khan would recoil in horror if someone offered them the means to listen to all private conversations or disarm all adult men. Today, rulers are already studying how to genetically program the behavior of future generations. They are not satisfied with the destructive power of demons; they want the creative power of gods.

It is one of the most atrocious perversities of our time that a person imbued with the simple desire to become wealthy is considered morally harmful and almost a criminal, while an aspiring politician is seen as a beautiful example of idealism, kindness, and love for others. A century that thinks this way begs the heavens to send them a Stalin or a Hitler.

6. Money x knowledge

Mortal vanity

Zero Hour, June 16, 2002

The bourgeoisie is weaving the rope by which it will be hanged.

V. I. Lenin

In Brazil, anyone who has some money in their pocket — and especially in the stock market — believes themselves to be a connoisseur of the world, a master of the most intimate secrets of the human mind, history, society, and power. Even if their financial success is due to chance, help from friends, or a generous father, their financial victory seems to them undeniable proof of the truthfulness of their ideas and the wisdom of their preferences. Based on this conviction, they believe they can confidently opine on a variety of subjects without the need for long and difficult studies. In the most exhausting of cases, all they need is a quick glance at the daily news and a rapid inspection of the latest bestsellers acclaimed by the New York Times.

This is the perfect opulent idiot that left-wing intellectuals use to support the “cultural revolution” aimed at preparing the destruction of the class of opulent idiots.

The supreme vanity of this type of individual is to show that they are not only a crude materialist and greedy, but a superior soul, an open mind — and, according to the conventional logic that inspires them, no one can be more open than one who opens up to what is adverse. Furthermore, being hospitable to the enemy is not only a sign of tolerance and democratic spirit: it is proof of the courage and overbearing tranquility of someone who, feeling they have complete control of the situation, can afford the luxury of exposing themselves unarmed to those who would have reasons to kill them.

Could there be a more attractive temptation for a man who, having satisfied his appetite for material goods, desires nothing more from this world than some psychological pleasure, some ego satisfaction?

Therefore, the idiot, believing he honors himself, courts, nourishes, and strengthens his enemies, who flatter him to his face while mocking him behind his back. They count the millions they have obtained from him for the promotion of the socialist cultural revolution and already foresee him as a cadaver after the victory of the cause he financed.

As evident as the danger of this cause may be to outside observers, it remains invisible to those who subsidize it. This is necessarily so because no idiot could imagine himself superior if he did not also show himself superior to common ideological and partisan conflicts, repeatedly declaring that left and right are outdated stereotypes. Therefore, they accept as high cultural productions, ideologically neutral by their very superiority, the most obvious and violent expressions of leftist propaganda. Systematically cultivating the inability to grasp the ideological meaning of what they read and hear becomes the dominant principle of self-education for the opulent idiot. The deeper he sinks into this obstinate blindness, the more he is flattered by the surrounding environment as a cultured and tasteful man, eventually believing himself to be the bearer of these two lofty qualities.

But no indulgence in vain tolerance would be complete without being complemented and underscored by the ascetic renunciation of anything that might seem like an argument in his own defense, a shameful submission of high culture to the interests of the bourgeois class.

Thus, the idiot will not only generously finance those who conspire against his class but will refrain from doing the same with those who wish to help it. He will even deny the most meager contribution to people and entities that seem in any way pro-capitalist, liberal, or conservative.

But, as it is not enough for Caesar’s wife to be honest, it is equally important to appear so. Therefore, he will even distance himself from contact with anyone suspected of rightism to please his elegant left-wing circles. He delights in making jokes about them and criticizes them as paranoid, alarmists, fearful, or radical, unlike the tolerant, democratic, calm, and self-assured people like himself.

Thus, the opulent idiot not only helps spread the ideas of his enemies but actively collaborates in the censorship and suppression of those of his allies.

Once these behaviors become habits, the opulent idiot is transformed, probably definitively, into a devout practitioner and zealous guardian of that kind of tolerance that Herbert Marcuse, when he invented it, called “liberating tolerance” and defined in terms that leave no room for the slightest ambiguity: “All tolerance for the left, none for the right.”

Proof that the application of this rule has been successful is that while useless and harmful entities like Viva-Rio and MST swim in money, the Liberal Institute of Brasília is about to close due to lack of resources. And there is no shortage of imbeciles who imagine that the Liberal Institutes represent the power of high finance, while that pair of perverse institutions and their numerous counterparts personify the helpless little people fighting against the powerful…

The counterculture in power

Diário do Comércio, March 15, 2010

I have observed a thousand times that in today’s Brazil, the language of the self-proclaimed educated elite has been reduced to a formal system of pressures and counter-pressures, where words are valued for their accumulated emotional charge, with little or no reference to the corresponding data in the real experience of speakers and listeners.27

The highest function of language — the transposition of reality into abstract thought and its return to reality as a tool for illuminating experience — is thus blocked, leaving only, on one side, the crude and direct expression of desires and fears, and on the other, the imposition of stereotyped reactions, like commands issued by a trainer to animals who do not expect any rational understanding from their trained subjects, only automatic, obedient, mindless responses.

The causes of this state of affairs can be traced back to the “counterculture” of the 1960s, under whose influence the mindset of the people who now govern the country was formed. While as a pure expression of youthful protest against a world that was too complex, the counterculture could even exert some positive function, serving as a critical stimulus for the renewal of the ancient legacy that increasingly legitimizes the dominant culture only superficially. However, when the counterculture itself becomes the dominant culture, the countercultural wave solidifies into a compulsive, mechanical, and foolish inversion of all values and principles. Within a generation, the highest knowledge, the richest and most delicate functions of intelligence, and the most essential values of rationality, morality, and the arts give way to the mechanical repetition of slogans and clichés laden with senseless hatred and emotional blackmail, useful only in provoking extreme servile obedience that, to the manipulator’s greater satisfaction, is camouflaged under affectations of spontaneity and even rebellion at the very moment when everything yields to the injunctions from above. Transformed into a stereotype itself, nonconformism becomes the official pretext for the most extreme and abject conformism, one that not only obeys but also seeks to please, flatter, and serve.

In the beginning, the only victim is high culture, which disappears under the glorification of the worst and basest. Soon after, the entire educational system becomes infected: the demand for quality is replaced by “political correctness,” and the clamor of pressure groups becomes the sole source of pedagogical authority, imposing new standards of conduct instead of the rules of grammar, logic, and arithmetic, rewarding sex appeal rather than good grades, and in the most scandalous cases, openly encouraging criminal acts under the pretext that they are inherent to youth or justifiable expressions of protest against the establishment, as if the proponents of this idea were not themselves the establishment now.

Until then, the old ruling elite can remain indifferent to the process, as it does not directly affect them. They might even take a malicious delight in seeing the revolutionaries content themselves with destroying education and culture, which mean nothing to them, without touching their own wealth. When faced with the revolutionary devastation of all values, the wealthy calmly assert that “our democratic institutions are solid,” meaning they care little about the destruction of the world as long as their wealth remains intact — as if it were a metaphysical entity, existing in a vacuum, independent of political and social contingencies.

But the next step in the revolutionary demolition of society shakes even the false security of the bourgeoisie. This happens when the generation of young people formed under the influence of the counterculture begins to occupy high positions in legislative, fiscal, and judicial bureaucracies and transforms their torrid fantasies into de facto states. Faced with the deeds of these creatures, the rich begin to realize for the first time that money is not power in itself; it is merely a provisional symbol guaranteed by effective power, political power, now in the hands of people who no longer want to secure it.

I won’t even mention the obvious National Human Rights Plan, which guarantees invaders immediate possession of the invaded property and makes them the sovereign judges of their own crimes. Equally perverse and more insidious, Bill No. 2,412 modifies the criteria for the administrative processing of tax executions. As recently warned by Professor Denis Rosenfield, “the project is frightening the country’s legal sector and starting to mobilize big business. It simply grants the right to transfer assets from tax debtors to the Union, excluding due process of law.” Do you owe the tax office? They come and take your properties instantly, directly, without needing a court judgment for it.

You’ll say it’s unconstitutional? What good is that against the Binding Precedent No. 10 of the Federal Supreme Court, based on which the singular judges can no longer suspend the application of laws or normative acts that seem unconstitutional to them? Whether unconstitutional or not, each law, decree, or ordinance will continue to apply to all particular cases until the plenary of the court or the Supreme Court, after several years or decades and an endless series of damages, decides otherwise.

This kind of heinous justice does not arise out of nowhere. It presupposes decades of destruction of legal intelligence, gradually replaced by verbally politically pleasing automatons in line with the “revolutionary mentality.” And this substitution does not happen until the entire sphere of higher culture and education has been infected by counterculture. What good does it do to “mobilize the business community” to neutralize this or that specific effect of a general process of cultural degradation to which this business community remained neutral or cheerfully complicit for thirty years? What good does it do to try to wipe off some splashes when the wave that fires them has already grown to the point of submerging the entire territory? What good does it do to try to win a battle when you have already accepted defeat in the war?

Either the business community is willing to fight on all fronts, including those farthest from its immediate interest, or it will soon end this suicidal farce of defending in retail what it has already given up in wholesale.

The collective suicide of the rich

[from: Duas notas de rodapé]
Zero Hora, January 12, 2003

If you are still surprised by the indecent haste with which the businessmen in this country embrace a party that does not hide its purpose of exterminating them as a class, you are at least two centuries behind. Similar phenomena have already been observed and well explained since the time of the French Revolution, and they always end the same way: with the extinction of the class.

Read the following paragraph:

While order remains, property has a superior influence to that of those who may wish to violate public peace; but when law and order are largely destroyed, the rich are always too inclined to seek in submission or in changing parties the means of protecting themselves and their fortunes. Property, which under normal circumstances makes its holders brave, becomes, in times of imminent danger, the cause of their selfish cowardice.

Sir Walter Scott, whom most only know as a novelist but who was also an excellent historian, wrote this in his monumental Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, Emperor of the French, with A Preliminary View of the French Revolution.28 It is a book full of defects, understandable in a first attempt to synthesize such a mass of documents — perhaps the largest ever examined by any historian — about a recent past. But it remains a classic, and though it may fail here and there in reconstructing events (Sainte-Beuve pointed out significant errors in his Causeries du Lundi), its best part lies precisely in its observations of psychology.

Similar observations are found in Origines de la France Contemporaine by Hippolyte Taine, which, in my opinion, is the best history book ever written in this world. Revolutionary ideas do not spread among the people before they have gained the adherence or at least the complicity of the “dominant class.” Antonio Gramsci provided precise recipes for accelerating the collective suicide of the rich. Nowhere else were they applied with such success as in Brazil.

A sample of this success: today, there is not a single rich person who does not feel at least a vague sense of guilt for being rich, for having risen in life through the rational organization of means to make a profit. In contrast, no one feels ashamed of having risen through the organization of enraged militancy, through exploiting collective envy and resentment, through engineering hatred. Of course, objectively, no capitalist can be as bad and wicked, as a capitalist, as a revolutionary agitator. But the new scale of values, which turns the latter into an angel and the former into a demon, is so deeply ingrained in the collective sensibility that it functions as an automatic premise for any moral judgment. Capitalists are the first to subscribe to it, prostrating themselves at the feet of the adversary like sinners seeking absolution. As Sir Walter already said.

Remember Karl Radek

Jornal do Brasil, May 31, 2007

Karl Radek, one of the mentors of the communist uprising in 1917, was also a pioneer of the sexual revolution. His campaign against “bourgeois morality” and his calls for free love so permeated revolutionary propaganda that an entire generation of misfit youths, born to single mothers, came to be known as “Karl Radek’s brood.” Later, the man fell into disgrace, like many other fathers of the revolution. Stalin, with a touch of dark humor, had him interned in a juvenile delinquents' prison, where the old revolutionary, already sick and frail, became their favorite punching bag. Karl Radek died beaten and trampled by the children of his sexual revolution.

This episode doesn’t leave my mind when I hear the edifying speeches with which the apostles of Chavismo justify the closure of RCTV,29 accusing the channel of disseminating immorality and destroying the sacred institution of the family. That’s the left for you. One day they advocate widespread abortion, gay marriage, the criminalization of the Bible, and the teaching of homosexuality in elementary schools. When you jump on the bandwagon and collaborate, great, you become doubly useful: helping leftists spread moral chaos in capitalism and already providing the pretext they will use to throw you to the wolves when they no longer need your help. What astonishes me there is not the duplicity of tongues — it is inherent in the revolutionary spirit. What astonishes me is the number of powerful, wealthy, and self-proclaimed smart people who fall again and again for the seductive offers of the tempter, forgetting that he alternates this role with that of accuser, today leading them astray, tomorrow throwing it in the face of the sinner with furious eloquence from the pulpits, like Bishop Chávez.

In my forty years of journalism, I have never seen any of the major media moguls using their company to promote libertinism purely for the desire for profit. All preserved their image as respectable citizens and refrained from explicit pornography, leaving it to adventurers, the outlaws of the media industry. They only entered the arena when they felt that debauchery had been legitimized and, so to speak, ennobled by the consensus of the talking intelligentsia. Then, freed from scruples, they discovered the potential of a market they had previously despised. The key that changes the attitude of businesspeople is activated by the lay clergy, the enlightened intellectuals, bearers of the new tablets of the law, sanctioned by the authority of charlatans like Alfred Kinsey, Margaret Mead, and the Frankfurt School.

Well, gentlemen, those same people who induced you to be ashamed of your old “bourgeois morality” and advised you to turn your media outlets into megaphones of the pornocultural revolution know that you are only useful to them in a part of the journey. When they are sure they control the police power, they will shut down the TV channels and newspapers they used and accuse them of corrupting morality and promoting bad habits. Then it will be too late to learn from Karl Radek’s example.

7. Revolutionaries x better world

The only absolute evil

O Globo, February 9, 2002

Norman Cohn, in The Pursuit of the Millenium, points out a prominent characteristic of certain medieval Gnostic sects: their followers felt so intimately united with God that they imagined themselves freed from the possibility of sinning. “This, in turn, liberated them from all restraint. Every impulse they felt was experienced as a divine command. Thus, they could lie, steal, or fornicate without any pangs of conscience.”

The essential continuity of the Gnostic worldview in modern messianic ideologies—Nazism, Fascism, Socialism—is a historical fact well established by the studies of Cohn, Voegelin, Billington, and many other pioneers who explored the subject since the 1930s. It is true that these studies remain largely unknown to our academic establishment. But whether the intellectual elite of Catolé do Rocha knows it or not, the fact remains: a perfectly clear line of succession runs from medieval heresies to the revolutionaries of 1789, to Marx, Sorel, Gramsci, and all their successors in the self-appointed mission of “transforming the world.”

Along this line, the belief in their own essential impeccability, derived from the certainty of intimate union with God, the sense of history, eternal ideals of justice and freedom, or any other legitimizing transcendent authority—because this varies with cultural fashion without changing its function—infuses them, generation after generation, with a perfectly sincere feeling of honor and sanctity at the very moment they plunge into the depths of abomination and crime.

This is not mere hypocrisy but an effective rupture of conscience, which elevates to unattainably divine heights the virtues of the future society that the individual believes to represent already. This, ipso facto, renders them incapable of judging their own actions in light of common morality while investing themselves, in their own eyes, with the highest moral authority to condemn the sins of the world. Thus, the lowest conduct can coincide with the loftiest claims of nobility and sanctity.

It was with a perfect sense of righteousness that, after the end of the Second World War, Marxists continued to denounce the tyranny and genocide of the Nazis retrospectively while rapidly surpassing their former competitors in the practice of tyranny and genocide.

In democracies, any vulgar politician caught in minor wrongdoing loses their composure, enters into a depressive crisis, and makes a deplorable figure in the eyes of the public. It is because they have not immunized themselves beforehand, through immersion in the purifying waters of ideological self-beatification, against the feeling of guilt. Harassed by accusations, they hear the clamor of their own moral conscience, long repressed, rising from the shadows to condemn them precisely at the moment they need to gather their strength to defend themselves against external adversaries. Then they waver and fall. This is how Nixon fell. This is how Collor fell.

On the other hand, the revolutionary, the militant, the ideological wrongdoer, when exposed to countless proofs of their bloody and inhuman crimes, feels rejuvenated, strengthened, exalted. For these crimes are not crimes to them; they are signs of future goodness. That’s the only way to explain why men who, wherever they have risen to power, have only spread death, misery, and incomparable suffering, as they did in Eastern Europe, China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cambodia, and Cuba, still feel sufficiently authoritative to denounce the sins of capitalist democracies as if they hadn’t proven a thousand and one times their ability to correct themselves and were urgently in need of moral advice from revolutionaries, narcoguerrillas, and genociders.

It is needless to say that this self-deification, which shields the apostle of a “better world” from awareness of their own sins, corresponds literally to the total surrender of the soul to the worst of sins: demonic pride. “All sins adhere to evil so that they may be fulfilled,” said Saint Augustine. “Only pride clings to the good so that it may perish.”

The destruction of good through internal parasitism is more efficient than the mere accumulation of evils. Reduced to a legitimizing pretext for revolutionary violence, cruelty, and disorder, the good ends up identifying with them, and any attempt to resist them becomes a heinous sin. When the task of morally judging society falls precisely upon those individuals who have become the most incapable of judging themselves, the result is an inverted morality, an antimorality of perverts and villains that asserts itself with the inflexibility of a neo-moralism more rigid and intolerant than any known moral system. Nowadays, in educated circles, no one can speak against drug use, promiscuity, mass abortion, or certain forms of banditry without being surrounded by disapproving looks, as if they had said something indecent.

By confusing, debasing, and prostituting the standards of judgment, the mere presence in intellectual and political life of a sufficient number of men imbued with this inverted religiosity is already a powerful factor of moral deterioration in society, inhibiting repressive action and instilling boundless self-confidence in delinquents.

In the end, there will be nothing more to be argued against robbery, homicide, rape, except that they may have lacked the due ideological nihil obstat. That is, for example, the reasoning of Congressman Walter Pinheiro, leader of the PT (Workers' Party) in the Federal Chamber, when speaking out against the kidnappers of Washington Olivetto: “They kidnap, torture for money, have no ethics. They are not guerrillas, they are bandits.” What does this mean, other than the fact that kidnapping, torturing, and killing in the name of the congressman’s beliefs, in the manner of a Fidel Castro or a Pol-Pot, would make the criminals beautiful examples of superior morality? And notice that there is no simple difference between “common crime” and “political crime.” Pinochet didn’t kill for money either. He killed for politics, but that alone does not suffice to beatify him in the eyes of the congressman. Not just any political motive is acceptable. The left has, today as in the times of Stalin, not only a monopoly on the license to commit crimes but also a monopoly on benevolent crime. Kidnappings, tortures, homicides are neither bad nor good in themselves. They are relative. The only crime, the only sin, the only absolute evil, is being against His Excellency’s party. Hence, his colleague, Heloísa Helena, shows less indignation at the rising tide of criminality than at the mere attempt to investigate the more than probable connections between kidnappings, drug trafficking, and continental revolution. Crimes may be condemnable or praiseworthy, depending on the purity gradation of their ideological pretexts. The investigation is absolutely wrong because it is “from the right.”

The transfiguration of disaster

O Globo, June 16, 2001

Whenever leftists want to impose a new item on their agenda, they argue that it is the only way to cure certain ills. Invariably, when the proposal wins, the evils it promised to eliminate are exacerbated. Normally, under such circumstances, the left would be held accountable for the disaster. But this never happens, because instantly the original legitimating argument disappears from the repertoire and is replaced by a new system of allegations, celebrating failure as a success or as an inescapable historical necessity.

No one will understand anything about the history of the 20th century - nor this beginning of the 21st - if they do not know this mechanism of retroactive justification by which people are led to work towards undeclared goals, which would scandalize them if they knew them and which can only be achieved indirectly by the carrot-and-stick method.

Some examples will make this very clear.

  1. When the Communist Party launched its program for the destruction of “bourgeois” family institutions, embodied in what would later become “sexual liberation,” its main claim, devised by Dr. Wilhelm Reich, was that homosexuality, sadomasochism, fetishism, etc., were the fruits of repressive patriarchal education. Once the cause was eliminated, these deviant behaviors would tend to disappear from the social scene. Well, the last residues of patriarchal values were suppressed from Western education between the seventies and eighties, and what happened next? The spread, on an apocalyptic scale, of those very behaviors that were promised to be eliminated. Once achieved, these behaviors began to be celebrated as healthy, worthy, and meritorious, and any criticism of them came to be condemned - sometimes under penalty of law - as intolerable abuse and an attack on human rights.

  2. When the global left began to fight for the legalization of abortion, one of its main arguments was that the large number of abortions was caused by prohibition, which facilitated the action of charlatans, meddlers, and generally unqualified people. Legalization, it was promised, would require abortion to be performed under medically acceptable conditions, therefore reducing the number of cases. What was the result? In the first year, the number of abortions in the U.S. went from 100,000 to one million and has not stopped growing to this day. At least 30 million babies have been sacrificed, while the apologists for legalization, instead of admitting the fallacy of their initial argument, celebrate the accomplished fact, trying to marginalize and criminalize any criticism of the new state of affairs.

  3. When American leftists invented the policy of quotas and compensations known as affirmative action, they claimed that it would decrease crime among the black population. Once the new policy was officialized, the number of crimes committed by blacks against whites significantly increased, according to FBI statistics. What did the apostles of affirmative action do then? Did they humbly acknowledge that reinforcing the sense of racial identity was feeding prejudices and race conflicts? Not at all. They celebrated the increase in racial hostility as a progress of democracy.30

  1. When, wanting to destroy the North American tradition that considered education a duty of the community, churches, and families rather than the State, the American left claimed the bureaucratization of education, one of their basic arguments was that juvenile delinquency could only be controlled through state educational action. With Jimmy Carter, in 1980, the USA for the first time had a Department of Education and uniform teaching programs. Two decades later, delinquency among children and teenagers has not only been growing much more than before, but it has adopted public schools as its headquarters, today transformed into risk areas, to the point that, at the beginning of the year, New York City was privatizing theirs because it had no means of controlling the violence in them. In response, what does the left do? Does it admit it was wrong? No. It fights for state uniformization of education on a global scale.

  2. In Brazil, the only way to reduce violence in rural areas, leftists proclaimed, was to give land and money to the MST (Landless Workers' Movement). Well, the lands were given — it was the largest distribution in all human history, with a lot of money behind. Violence did not decrease. On the contrary, it increased a lot. Does the left confess that it was wrong? No. It tries to organize violence and celebrate it as the achievement of a new historical level in the struggle for socialism.

Examples could be multiplied ad infinitum — and note that I deliberately avoided mentioning extreme cases, which occurred in the very ambit of socialist countries, such as the collectivization of agriculture in the USSR, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in China, the Cuban revolution, etc., limiting myself to facts that occurred in the capitalist world.

The salvific promise transfigured into disaster and followed by a change of legitimizing discourse was, in short, the essential and constant modus agendi of the global left throughout a century, and there is not the slightest sign that any leftist mentor has a conscience problem because of it. On the contrary, they all continue promising the solution of evils, while already having ready, in the drawer, the future legitimization of the aggravated evils. They promise to decrease drug consumption through liberalization, control corruption through “participatory budgeting”, repress delinquency through civilian disarmament or through the Leninist “alternative law” that criminalizes the social position of the accused rather than his criminal act. They know perfectly well where all this leads — but they also know that nobody would support them if they proclaimed aloud what they want.

At last

Diário do Comércio, September 21, 2011

The Brazilian media always ends up discovering things. Just wait a few decades, and you, already mature or old, receive the vital information that could have changed your destiny if it had reached you in your youth.

The first person who told me about Roger Scruton, in the early 1990s, was Daniel Brilhante de Brito, the most cultured Brazilian I have ever known. I quoted the English philosopher in 1993, in The New Age and the Cultural Revolution, foreseeing — nothing is easier in this country — that his work would hardly come to the knowledge of our compatriots. Seven years later, the Critical Dictionary of Right-wing Thought, paid for with government money to the cream of the speaking left — 104 intellectuals who promised to exhaust the subject —, still blatantly exhibited the total university ignorance of an author who, by that time, was considered in his country and in the USA as one of the most vigorous men of ideas in the conservative field.31 The only excuse that can be offered is that they had not excluded Scruton out of personal spite. On the contrary, they were rigorously democratic in the distribution of their ignorance: they did not know, equally, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Russel Kirk, Thomas Sowell, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Alain Peyrefitte and practically all the other authors without whom there would be no “right-wing thought” to be dictionarized. A brief consultation with the popular Dictionary of American Conservatism, published three years earlier, would have been enough to give those gentlemen the minimum information they lacked on the subject they were pontificating about, but probably the federal funds with which they filled their pockets were not enough to buy a copy.

I returned to talk about Scruton, based on once a year, from 1999 until 2008. In vain. For a long time, the communist commandment of Milton Temer, “Olavo de Carvalho is not to be commented on”,^999 prevailed in newspaper newsrooms and universities, the zeal of disciples extended to the authors cited in my articles. Some, of course, read these authors in secret, like someone who hides in the bathroom with a Carlos Zéfiro booklet. But they waited, to comment on them, for time to erase all association between those names and me. Thus the term of a generation passed.

I imagine what the lives of thousands of Brazilian students would have been like if they had read, as soon as it was published, in 1985, the now classic Thinkers of the New Left.32 At that time, Marxism was already staggering, but the ideas of the “new left”, which promised to inject new life into it, were just landing in the hut. If Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser were already stars in the academic heavens of Tabajara, others, like Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas, had just disembarked, and others still, like Immanuel Wallerstein and E.P. Thompson, were vague promises of new dazzlements that would only spurt out in the eyes of the eager student devotees in the 1990s. To each of these authors Scruton dedicated modest eight or ten pages that reduced them to mummies, living up to what would later be said of another conservative philosopher, Australian David Stove (also unknown in these parts): “He doesn’t take prisoners. He writes to kill.”

If any distant hope of the recovery of Marxist intellectual dignity still remained in my disillusioned leftist mind, it was primarily this book that exorcised it. A Brazilian translation of it would have done good to many people. Perhaps it would have even weakened Milton Temer’s faith in the leftist monopoly of rationality, sparing him the embarrassment of continuing to carry that burden on his stooped shoulders as a septuagenarian.

It was to prevent this tragedy that the dominant leftist elite in academic and editorial circles33 not only refrained from reading conservative books but also took all the necessary measures to ensure that no one else read them either. Not that they acted according to a deliberate plan. No: these people practice exclusion and marginalization of their opponents with spontaneous naturalness. The Leninist rule of not coexisting with the opposition but eliminating it has become ingrained in their minds as a second nature. Since the left took power in this country, it has become a widespread and common habit to suppress dissenting voices and then proclaim that they do not exist.

That is why only now the indispensable Roger Scruton comes to the knowledge of the Brazilian public, through the initiative of the Veja magazine’s yellow pages, dated September 21, where he says what everyone thinks but lacks the means to say aloud. Examples:

  1. The London rioters are not excluded poor. They are spoiled kids, supported by social security, who have grown accustomed to the idea that they have all the rights and no obligations.34

  1. No country can endure an unlimited flow of immigrants without integrating them into its national culture.

  2. The entire left-wing ideology is based on the imbecilic idea of “zero sum,” where someone can only gain something if someone else loses the same.

  3. Marx, Lenin, and Mao openly advocated the violent liquidation of entire populations, but the left becomes indignant when we attribute moral blame to them for the obvious consequences of applying their ideas. However, if a conservative writes a word against the excesses of forced immigration, he is immediately accused of encouraging crimes against immigrants.

  4. The European Union is unworkable. The euro, a terminal patient, can attest to that.

  5. The left feels the need to always explain everything in terms of culprits and victims, but since every explanation of this kind soon proves unsustainable, it is necessary to constantly seek new victims so that waves of indignation succeed one another endlessly, fueling the revolutionary leadership that would not survive a week without it. The first official victim was the proletarians, then the Indians, the blacks, the women, the youth, the gays, and now, finally, the greatest victim of all: the planet. In the name of saving the planet, allegedly threatened with extinction by capitalism, it is permissible to kill, steal, kidnap, set fire, deceive, and lie without end, and above all, to spend money extorted from evil capitalists through the redeeming State.35

In all these cases, it is historically proven that the situation of the alleged victims under capitalism has never stopped improving, while it substantially worsened in socialist countries. However, the leftist mentality has the compulsive tendency to feel more outraged with others the more its own guilt increases. It is the old Leninist precept: “Accuse them of what you do, call them what you are.”

In addition to his philosophical work, of inestimable value to scholars, Scruton has been saying these things, which are plainly true, for many decades and with a language that is both elegant and cutting, discouraging even the most fiery of opponents.

I hope that the interview in Veja magazine will draw the attention of readers to the books of this indispensable author.

Regarding item 6, it is worth adding here some information that perhaps Scruton himself does not have, but which shows how right he is. In the 1950s, billionaire globalist groups—the metacapitalists, as I call them, those individuals who have made so much money from capitalism that they no longer wish to subject themselves to market fluctuations and thus become natural allies of leftist statism—initiated the hiring of dozens of first-rate intellectuals to choose the ultimate victim, someone whose defense, in case of threat, society as a whole would rush to with motherly solicitude, automatically casting suspicion of betrayal to the human species on all possible objections. After considering several hypotheses, the researchers concluded that no one would refuse to fight in favor of the Earth, Mother Nature. From then on, subsidies began to flow into the pockets of ecologists willing to collaborate in building the myth of the planet threatened by free markets. The conclusions of that study were published under the title Report from Iron Mountain—the living proof that planetary salvationism is the greatest scientific hoax of all time. The writing was published anonymously, but economist John Kenneth Galbraith, whose credibility is beyond doubt in this matter, confirmed the authenticity of the document by confessing that he himself was part of that study group and helped draft the conclusions.36

8. Unmasking

The good old double tongue

Diário do Comércio, November 28, 2010

If there is something that history confirms without a single contrary example, it is this: every truth or valuable idea that has ever come to human knowledge was discovered by one or a few isolated individuals; when disseminated among the masses, it loses its original momentum and crystallizes into hollow formulas, endlessly repeatable, which can be filled with the most diverse meanings and used for the most diverse purposes.

Everything starts with inspiration and ends in mimicry. It has always been and always will be this way.

What distinguishes the so-called “modern” thought, from the 18th century onwards, and radically differentiates it from all the previous ones, is its ability to generate theories that come ready to be massified, and that extract from there, precisely there, all the “intellectual” prestige they may come to enjoy. It’s as if they leap over the stage of solitary inspiration and already pronounce themselves, from the cradle, as an appeal to the masses. This began to happen from the moment when men of ideas lost faith in the knowledge of truth and began to seek, instead, alignment with the “spirit of the times”. How many philosophers and writers today are openly praised, not because they have discovered some truth, some essential value, but simply and above all because they have expressed, with their mistakes and lies, the craziest and most abject aspirations of “their time”? If it weren’t for this, types like Machiavelli, Diderot, Marx, Freud, or even Darwin wouldn’t have a single devoted admirer today. They would be read, if at all, as historical documents of a despicable past.

The distinctive trait of the theories I am referring to is congenital ambiguity. They do not affirm anything very clear, they contradict themselves at every line, they skilfully dodge confrontation with facts and, when cornered against the wall by some devastating objection, they change their meaning with the greatest ease, singing victory when they can show that the adversary has proven nothing against what they had not said.

Of course, a theory’s aptitude for this protean transmutation does not all appear at once. The continuation of debates and the zeal of disciples in preserving the image of the master are what reveal the potential for slippery evasiveness contained in the exposition of the original idea.

Darwinism, for example, began as a “theory of intelligent design”, trying to show the logic of a divine intentionality behind the variety of natural forms. Today it appears as the most extreme antithesis of all “intelligent design”, without anyone explaining to us how it is possible that two symmetrically opposed theories continue to be one and the same.

Psychoanalysis, then, has so many versions that whatever you say against one of them can always be recycled as an argument in favor of some other - and the gains of all always revert, of course, in favor of Dr. Freud.

The very ease with which a theory converts into its contraries is praised as proof of the highest intellectual merit: what matters is not “truthfulness”, but “fecundity”.

But the theory most capable of exploiting everything that denies it in its own benefit is, without a doubt, Marxism. Everything it says already comes, at the source, in two versions: one that says yes, the other that says no. Whichever of the two emerges victorious will greatly increase the credit of the Marxist theory.

As Marx evades to clarify the coefficient of influence that economic causes have in producing historical mutations compared to other causes, you can opt for full economic determinism or for the complete innocuity of economic causes and continue declaring yourself, in both cases, a pure Marxist. Ernesto Laclau even declares that mere propaganda creates the oppressed class tasked with legitimizing it ex post facto, and no one stops considering him, for that, a luminary of Marxist thought.

The very Marxist idea of praxis — the inextricable mixture of theory and practice — seems tailor-made to take advantage of the most opposing situations: what denies Marxism in theory can favor the communist movement in practice (this is the case with Laclau’s ideas); the defeats of communism in practical politics can always be alleged as effects of “deviations” and, therefore, as confirmations of Marxist theory (Trotsky talking about Stalin).

The double language in Marxism appears not only in the main lines of theory and strategy, but also in the attitudes of Marxist intellectuals towards any event in cultural or political life. Everything there has two faces, each displayed or covered in rotation, depending on the convenience of the moment. In 1967, when the USSR Writers' Union proclaimed Solzhenitsyn a despicable and extremely dangerous type, the communist philosopher Georg Lukács swore that the author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich had an orthodox Marxist view of things. The communist movement was thus prepared for both eventualities: if the novelist was to be ignored in the West, his place in the dustbin of history was already guaranteed; if he was successful, it would be a success for Marxism. Some examples closer to us illustrate the game even more clearly. Lula and the FARC commander, Raúl Reyes, can preside over37 the assemblies of the São Paulo Forum and then claim that they never did anything in partnership.38 The FARC can publish in partnership with the PT the most important Marxist discussion magazine on the continent (America Libre) and at the same time be proclaimed, in the media, as damned traitors who have abandoned Marxism for pure greed for money. If the FARC wins, the São Paulo Forum wins along. If they lose, it comes out clean.

The double tongue characterizes snakes in the natural world, the devil in the realm of the spirit, and the dear ideas of modernity in the human and historical world.

Double tongue and strategy

O Globo, February 2, 2002

The term “commonplaces” was named as such by the Greco-Roman rhetoricians, who compared them to public dumps of mental waste, where the poorest of arguers could always find some used tool to extricate themselves from a disadvantageous confrontation with a wiser opponent. Every time someone resorts to one of these devices to create the impression of thought when they haven’t thought anything at all, everyone loses: language is harmed, intelligence debased, and public opinion deceived. Nevertheless, far be it from me to disdain the power of these old weapons.

The inexhaustible power of commonplaces, clichés, or stock phrases resembles that of a perpetual motion machine: the more worn-out they are, the more persuasive they become; the more irrelevant to the subject, the more effective. Their greatest virtue lies precisely in diverting the discussion from a difficult and poorly known topic to the solid ground of customary banalities, where conclusions are produced with the easy automatism of organic secretions. The price, of course, is completely avoiding the matter under debate — but what does that matter to someone who only wants to make a good impression?

There is no more commonplace nowadays than dismissing any allegation against leftism in limine, under the pretext that it arises from “hatred.” More typically: “visceral hatred.” You say that communists promoted the greatest genocides in history? That’s “visceral hatred.” You claim they created the Gulag and the Laogai, networks of concentration camps that surpassed the most macabre ambitions of the Nazis? “Visceral hatred.” You complain that they block the dissemination of their crimes? “Visceral hatred.” After repeating this hundreds of times, you will end up appearing worse than those who killed 100 million human beings, imprisoned many others, and now prohibit you from touching the subject. Come to think of it, you are the genocidal one, the tyrant, the monster. They only killed a few million people while maintaining, through prodigious feats of logical inventiveness, a lovely self-image as holy and well-intentioned souls. And here you come, ruthlessly tearing down that self-image. You are very wicked, my boy. You have no love in your heart.

The most curious thing is that this labeling comes precisely from adherents, sympathizers, and passive collaborators of an ideology that never hid its ultimate motivation. The advice of Gorky, the official writer of the Russian revolution, advocating physical revulsion towards the enemy, still resonates on this page. Perhaps the reader also remembers Brecht’s observation that if the accused in the Moscow Trials were innocent, they deserved to be shot all the more for the good of socialism. Maybe you are familiar with Eldridge Cleaver’s declaration that raping white women is a revolutionary merit. And perhaps Che Guevara’s formula has not disappeared from your memory, advising “uncompromising hatred of the enemy, a hatred that impels beyond the natural limitations of the human being and converts the guerrilla into an efficient and cold killing machine.”

But, of course, none of these gentlemen said or did these things out of hatred. You are the hateful one for going around telling everyone that they said and did them.

It is based on this peculiar communist logic of conclusion that, for example, the World Social Forum can display the banner of “peace,” understanding peace as the suspension of American actions in Afghanistan, which killed a few hundred people, but not the suspension of Chinese occupation in Tibet, which has killed over a million.

When Orwell said that the communists invented a new language in which love is hate, peace is war, yes is no, and no is yes, he did not exaggerate at all.

Duplicity, diversion, and camouflage are the very core of the communist soul. And anyone who engages in discussion with communists or their likes, sticking only to the literal content of their discourse without realizing that it is meant to cover up the profound logic of their actions, will be made a fool of. Let’s be frank, dear reader: if a visitor, with the manifest intention of seducing your wife, starts frequenting your house under the pretext of playing cards, do you think the best thing to do with the intruder is to focus on winning the game?

This is how someone proceeds when, faced with political organizations deeply involved in a continental revolutionary movement associated with drug trafficking, they discuss with them government programs and remedies for national problems, helping them feign a democratic atmosphere of peace and normality.

For the revolutionary, every public speech, especially electoral, is merely a tool. A tool as temporary and disposable as a strip of toilet paper or a condom. The definitive conquest of power, absolute control of the state, complete destruction of oppositions — these are, today as always, the only objectives of those who call themselves a new kind of leftist, converted to democracy but still complicit with Fidel Castro’s regime. They use, as legitimate instruments of the democratic process, the same communist weapons as always: encouraging and legitimizing the violence of the masses (hysterically denouncing the reaction of the aggrieved), dismantling from within and from above the military, police, and judicial apparatus, manipulating and altering the meaning of laws, controlling the means of information, education, energy sources, and the road network, fostering banditry, and then blaming capitalist society for it.

Discussing economics and administration with these charlatans is falling into a dirty game, playing precisely the role they have reserved for their future victims in the pantomime. The only thing to do is to unmask, behind their varied, artful, and disorienting allegations, the constancy and ruthless logic of their conquest strategy.

For the same reasons, it is useless to try to fight them with accusations of banal corruption, identical to those with which they easily destroy the reputations of their opponents. First, because the ideologically intoxicated portion of the electorate, constituting the contingent of their fixed voters, is not scandalized by dishonest acts committed by their leaders, which they believe to be in favor of the revolution. Second, because the organization committed to the struggle for a general objective that is bad, dishonest, and treacherous in essence will always try to be as honest as possible in the instrumental details of daily politics, not only to avoid problems along the way but also to be able to avail themselves of a deceptive appearance of moral superiority: nothing is stricter than the internal moralism of mafias and revolutionary parties. No, leftist perfidy will never be overcome through timid nibbles at the edges. It must be struck at the heart, and that heart is called: strategy. Either we unmask them or we resign ourselves to being governed by a Pol Pot, a Fidel Castro, or a Ceaucescu.

How to debate with leftists

Diário do Comércio (editorial), June 20, 2007

The liberals and conservatives of this country will never free themselves from the mud while they continue to believe that the only thing that separates them from leftists is a divergence of ideas, fit for polite discussions between equally honest and respectable people. The specific difference of the global revolutionary movement is that it instills in its followers, servants, and even sympathizers a morally and psychologically different substance than what circulates in the hearts and minds of normal humanity. The revolutionary feels like a member of a superhuman anointed class, carrying special rights denied to ordinary people and even inaccessible to their imagination. When you debate with a leftist, they heavily rely on these rights, which you completely ignore. The common rule of debate, which you strictly follow expecting them to do the same, is for them just a partial clause in a broader and more complex code, granting them means of action far more flexible than those of their opponent. For you, proving inconsistency is a deadly blow to an argument. For them, inconsistency can be a precious instrument to induce perplexity in the adversary and psychologically subjugate them. For you, a contradiction between actions and words is proof of dishonesty. For them, it’s a matter of method. The very view of polemical confrontation as a dispute of ideas only applies to you. For the revolutionary, ideas are integral parts of the dialectical process of the struggle for power; they have no inherent value; they can be exchanged like socks or underwear. Every revolutionary is willing to defend “x” or the opposite of “x” depending on tactical conveniences. If you defeat them in the battle of “ideas,” they will integrate the winning idea into a strategic game that will make it function, in practice, contrary to its verbal statement. You win, but you don’t take the prize. The debate with a revolutionary is always governed by two simultaneous codes, of which you only know one. When you least expect it, they appeal to the secret code and trip you up.

You might be scandalized that a deserter from the national troops is promoted to general post mortem while, in the regime he wanted to establish in the country, summary execution is the fate not only of deserters but also of mere civilians who try to leave the territory. You think that denouncing this monstrous contradiction delivered a deadly blow to the revolutionary’s convictions. But deep down, they know that the less explained and more scandalous the contradiction, the more it serves to habituate the public to the implicit belief that revolutionaries cannot be judged by common morality. The defeat in the field of logical arguments is an incomparably more valuable psychological victory. It puts the revolutionary cause beyond the reach of logic.

You cannot defeat the revolutionary with simple “arguments.” You must add the integral psychological unmasking of a tactic that aims not to win debates but to use even the inferiority of arguments as an instrument of power. In every debate situation, you must transcend the sphere of logical confrontation and expose the action scheme in which the revolutionary inserts the exchange of arguments and the psychological and political benefit they intend to derive from it, far beyond its apparent result.

But does that mean that the only effective debate with leftists is one that refuses to be confined to the formal rules of argumentation and instead delves into a complete and merciless psychological unmasking? Proving that a leftist is wrong means nothing. You must show how they are wicked, perverse, false, deliberate, and Machiavellian behind their appearances as sincere, polite, and civilized debaters. Do that, and you will make them weep in despair because, deep down, they know themselves and know that they are no good. Do not give them the consolation of a civilized camouflage woven from the skin of a naive adversary.

  1. Editor’s Note: “On June 28, the Supreme Court of Honduras ordered the arrest of President Manuel Zelaya for violating the Constitution and threatening to use force against the legislative branch. Instead of executing the order, the military allowed him to escape to Costa Rica. The result: the entire world left accuses Honduras of having ‘expelled’ Zelaya, of having carried out a ‘coup,’ of having ‘broken the stability of the institutions.’ If they had arrested the criminal and brought him to trial, the world left would be just as angry as it is now, but it would have no pretext to say these things. It would have to invent other lies, more laborious, less persuasive” [Olavo de Carvalho, “Honduras Against Global Lies,” Diário do Comércio, September 28, 2009 — http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/090928dc.html].↩

  2. Editor’s Note: See “Engineering of Complacency,” in the Manipulation section of this chapter.↩

  3. Human Development Report, 1994.↩

  4. Editor’s Note: Regarding the disastrous consequences of racial quotas in universities, see the note in item 3 of the article “The transfiguration of disaster” in the chapter Revolução.↩

  5. Editor’s Note: Concerning civil disarmament, see the last three texts in the Obama section of the chapter EUA.↩

  6. Editor’s Note: The international treaty established in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997, with targets for reducing the emission of gases that allegedly contribute to the so-called greenhouse effect. For an analysis of the purposes behind the Protocol, such as weakening states' sovereignty in favor of global organizations, as wanted by the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haas, see Olavo de Carvalho, “Travessia perigosa,” Diário do Comércio, May 12, 2008 — http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/080512dc.html. To understand why the greenhouse effect and the alarmism about gas emissions are great deceptions, see interviews with climatologist and USP professor Ricardo Augusto Felício on the internet.↩

  7. See Goodman, Elliot R. The Soviet Plan for a World State. Rio de Janeiro: Presença, 1965.↩

  8. Editor’s Note: American banker David Rockefeller, patriarch of the family, confesses on page 427 of his autobiography Memoirs (New York, Random House, 2002): “For more than a century, ideological extremists from both ends of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my meeting with Fidel Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure—one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”↩

  9. Editor’s note: See Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2011; available in PDF at http://mises.org/document/2736.↩

  10. Editor’s Note: “The struggle for hegemony is not limited to the formal confrontation of ideologies but penetrates into a deeper terrain, which Gramsci calls, giving the term a peculiar meaning, ‘common sense.’ Common sense is an agglomeration of habits and expectations, mostly unconscious or semi-conscious, that govern the daily lives of people. It is expressed, for example, in clichés, typical verbal expressions, automatic gestures, more or less standardized ways of reacting to situations.” Olavo de Carvalho, A nova era e a revolução cultural, Instituto de Artes Liberais/Stella Caymmi Editora, 1994; available at the link: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/livros/negramsci.htm]. In the indicated text, the author explains that the providential mission of Gramscian intellectuals is to reform common sense.↩

  11. Editor’s Note: Éditions Notre-Dame des Grâces, 1998. Regarding this book by Pascal Bernardin, see also Olavo de Carvalho’s translation of the article “The Ecological Empire and Planetary Totalitarianism” by Charles Lagrave, originally published in the magazine Lectures Françaises in March 1999 and available at the link: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/convidados/empeco.htm.↩

  12. Editor’s Note: Published in Brazil in 2012 by Vide Editorial, at Olavo de Carvalho’s suggestion, under the title Maquiavel Pedagogo ou o Ministério da Reforma Psicológica. Olavo considers the book “the standard work on the subject.”↩

  13. Editor’s Note: “Cognitive dissonance is a conflict between beliefs and behavior. Temporary cognitive dissonances are normal and even desirable in human development. When the condition becomes chronic, the unity of moral consciousness is broken, and the individual has to seek outside of himself, in group approval or in the repetition of ideological slogans, a substitute for the lost integrity. As it spreads among the population, the inability to realistically judge one’s own conduct results in a general decline in morality, as well as the concomitant spread of criminality and destructive behavior, but according to social engineers, this is a modest price to pay for the dissolution of common sense and the implementation of the new desired behavioral models” [Olavo de Carvalho, “Losing Common Sense,” Diário do Comércio, April 1, 2013 — http://www.dcomercio.com.br/index.php/opiniao/sub-menu-opiniao/107126-perdendo-o-senso].↩

  14. Editor’s Note: The command “Change!” echoed around the world in 2008 as part of the slogan “Hope and Change,” used by the Democratic Party in Barack Hussein Obama’s first campaign for the presidency of the United States.↩

  15. The complete article is at http://frontpagemag.com/2012/03/16/americans-have-become-compliant.↩

  16. Editor’s Note: See “Crime Make-up Artists” in the Religion chapter.↩

  17. Editor’s Note: Analyzing an article by a Brazilian magistrate, the author explains how the Girondins went from being to the left of the king to the “right” of the revolution: “In the Estates-General, opened on May 5, 1789, the Girondins didn’t have that name yet. And they weren’t on the right but on the left. They were not enemies of the Jacobins; on the contrary, they were active members of the Jacobin Club. And far from being a moderate group, they became famous for their radicalism in advocating the use of force to overthrow the regime. They continued to play the same role in the National Constituent Assembly. Only in the National Convention, already in 1793, did the Girondins try to curb the growing violence, frightened by the terror and confusion they themselves had created, and were then accused of being reactionaries, receiving the derogatory nickname referring to the birth region of some of their leaders. The Estates-General had already ended four years before.” Olavo de Carvalho, “Um luminar da ciência,” O Globo, May 14, 2005 — http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/050514globo.htm. See also: “Resposta a um burro pretensioso,” June 9, 2005 — http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/textos/grijalbo.htm.↩

  18. Editor’s Note: In this book, it refers to the previous article on page 186.↩

  19. Editor’s Note: “The Holy Inquisition, which left-wing pop culture has consecrated as the ultimate symbol of repressive arrogance, was called ‘inquisition’ precisely because it inquired, that is, it asked questions and allowed the accused to answer. The term ‘inquisitorial’ was opposed to ‘accusatorial.’ In the procedural customs of barbarous centuries, an accusation reinforced by an oath and, if necessary, sustained by a duel, was sufficient as legal guarantee to send the defendant to the other world. The Inquisition prohibited the accusatorial method, making the right to defense a conditio sine qua non for the rationality of the evidence. Much improved, this principle eventually transcended the boundaries of strict legal domain, becoming the basic rule in all discussions of guilt and innocence.” Olavo de Carvalho, “Abolishing the Inquisition,” published in Jornal do Brasil on June 1, 2006, and available at: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/060601jb.html. Regarding the Inquisition, the author recommends the book L’inquisizione. Atti del Simposio Internazionale (Città del Vaticano, 29-31 ottobre 1998), from the collection “Studi e testi,” in the 2003 edition of the Vatican Apostolic Library — see http://www.ibs.it/code/9788821007613/inquisizione-atti-del.html.↩

  20. Editor’s Note: Referring to the then-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, also known as Lula.↩

  21. See Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring.↩

  22. See One Nation, Two Cultures: A Searching Examination of American Society in the Aftermath of Our Cultural Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.↩

  23. Le Bouc Émissaire. Paris: Grasset, 1982.↩

  24. Editor’s Note: The article “Consequences more than foreseeable” is part of the chapter Gayzismo.↩

  25. Psychanalyse pour la Personne. Paris: Le Seuil, 1962.↩

  26. Editor’s Note: “According to him [Antonio Gramsci], a crucial part of the strategy was the creation of a new calendar of saints that could overshadow, in the popular imagination, the prestige of the Catholic hagiography (as he viewed the Church as the biggest obstacle to the advancement of communism). The new pantheon would be entirely composed of celebrated communist leaders, based on the criterion that ‘Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht are greater than the greatest saints of Christ’—Gramsci’s exact words. The followers of the new cult, quite logically, elevated the creator of the calendar even higher in the celestial hierarchy, which is why one cannot talk about it without the corresponding sanctification.” [Olavo de Carvalho, The New Age and the Cultural Revolution, Institute of Liberal Arts/Stella Caymmi Editora, 1994; available at http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/livros/negramsci.htm].↩

  27. Editor’s Note: See the chapter Language, especially the article “The Trigger Word.”↩

  28. Editor’s Note: Using the American edition: Philadelphia, 1827, vol. I.↩

  29. Editor’s Note: The first television channel in Venezuela, founded in 1953, RCTV (Radio Caracas Televisión), was shut down by Hugo Chávez’s government on May 27, 2007, and its headquarters were immediately occupied by the military.↩

  30. Editor’s Note: On the racial quota policy in universities, there are at least two key points to consider: 1) In a video from the program True Outspeak on May 2, 2012, available at the link: http://www.midiasemmascara.org/true-outspeak/13028-true-outspeak-2-de-maio-de-2012.html, the author comments on a controversial article by journalist Mírian Macedo about the generalized distrust that will result from quotas in relation to black professionals, considering that if before skin color made no difference to these professionals' clients and patients, “now the person already comes with a sign: I am from the quota! This discredits anyone. Mírian said something absolutely undeniable. This will indeed create a prejudice against black professionals, a prejudice that in most cases will be unjust, of course; but that will happen." In other words: even if black doctors and dentists, for example, are competent, they will suffer suspicion that they are not, due to possibly facilitated academic formation by racial quotas. 2) In the U.S., the poor performances - as well as the high dropout rate - of students who enter elite universities through racial quotas have already yielded reports even from progressive publications such as the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/opinion/sunday/does-affirmative-action-do-what-it-should.html) and Atlantic magazine (http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-painful-truth-about-affirmative-action/263122/), showing that affirmative policies are producing effects contrary to those announced by their propagandists. For a good summary in Portuguese of the problem (called mismatch by the Americans), see the article “Normandy Landings,” by João Pereira Coutinho, published in Folha de S. Paulo on March 19, 2013 and available at the link: http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/colunas/joaopereiracoutinho/1248221-desembarques-na-normandia.shtml.↩

  31. Editor’s Note: See “Everything you wanted to know about the right — and will continue not knowing”, by Olavo de Carvalho, published in the Prose & Verse section of the newspaper O Globo on September 22, 2000 and available at the link: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/textos/naosabendo.htm.↩

  32. Editor’s Note: Longman, 1985.↩

  33. Editor’s Note: “Without any difficulty, I can list more than five hundred important books that have sparked intense discussions and serious studies in the USA and Europe, but remain totally unknown to our public simply because reading them would risk bursting the balloon of leftist self-worship and sweep countless academic and literary pretensions consecrated in this country over the last decades into oblivion.” [Olavo de Carvalho, “Endless Intellectual Misery”, Diário do Comércio, August 15, 2005 — http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/050815dc.htm]. In the text, the author divides the books ignored by the Brazilian publishing market into seven main categories, citing various titles in each one.↩

  34. Editor’s Note: “The hordes of rioters who today spread chaos through the streets of London, as they did in Paris in 1968, in Oslo in 2009, and in dozens of other Western capitals on various dates, are made up of those individuals who invariably value and extol the most tyrannical governments in the world. In Cuba, Iran, Zimbabwe, Sudan, or China, they would meekly accept slave labor and, during great civic festivities, they would sing praises to the regime. They would be models of disciplined behavior. Loosed in a modern democracy, they become resentful and antisocial, disdain the constitutional order that protects them, and, inflated with endless arrogance, go around knocking down and burning everything they find. What is this? Slave mentality. Inept to live in freedom, they respect only the whip, which they obey when it is near and celebrate in prose and verse when it is far away.” [Olavo de Carvalho, “Natural-Born Slaves”, Diário do Comércio, August 22, 2011 — http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/110822dc.html].↩

  35. Editor’s Note: Regarding the farce of global warming, for example, see the documentaries “The Great Global Warming Swindle,” produced by Channel 4 of British TV (and subtitled in Portuguese at the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpvpiBiuki4) and “Global Warming or Global Governance?” by Sovereignty International (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u81qXOYfKg). “In both of them, the thesis of human origin of global warming is not only contested but denounced as a deliberate fraud. One of the most eloquent pieces of evidence is that former American President Al Gore displays everywhere a graph of the comparative evolution of CO2 emissions and the increase in global temperature over 400,000 years, triumphantly concluding that the former phenomenon causes the latter. The whole credibility of this conclusion comes from a small detail: Gore shows the two curves separately. When we superimpose them, we find that temperature increases do not follow increases in CO2 emissions, but rather precede them. The clever guy simply reversed the cause and effect.” [Olavo de Carvalho, "Who, Pale Face?", editorial of Diário do Comércio, August 28, 2008].↩

  36. Editor’s Note: See also “The Hidden Face of Green Globalism” by Pascal Bernardin (http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/convidados/bernardin2.htm); and the previously cited “The Ecological Empire and Planetary Totalitarianism” by Charles Lagrave (http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/convidados/empeco.htm).↩

  37. Editor’s Note: Hugo Chávez confessed to having met one of the then commanders of the FARC Raúl Reyes and former president Lula at the meeting of the São Paulo Forum in 1995, in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, in Central America. I translate excerpts from Chávez’s speech at the time of Reyes' death [see note in the text “False secrets”, from the Intelligentzia chapter]: “I received an invitation to attend, in 1995, the São Paulo Forum, which was installed that year in San Salvador. (...) On that occasion, I met Lula, among others. And someone came to my post at the meeting, to a work table where we were in a group talking, and I remember he put his hand here [on the left shoulder] and said: ‘Dude, I want to talk to you.’ And I told him: ‘Who are you?’ ‘Raúl Reyes, one of the commanders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.’ We met that night, in some humble neighborhood in El Salvador. (...) And then a communication channel opened and he came here (...) and we talked for hours and hours. Then, on a third and last occasion, he also passed by here.” This speech is in the video from March 2008 in which Chávez regrets the elimination of Reyes by the Colombian Army in the northeast of Ecuador, and can be found at various addresses on Youtube, such as, for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRW-fdcaMfM.↩

  38. Editor’s Note: “So you’re saying, oh figure, that Raúl Reyes lied when he said he had presided over a Forum assembly alongside Lula? Are you saying that Hugo Chávez was delusional when he said that he met Raúl Reyes and Lula at a Forum meeting? Are you saying that the expedient of the magazine América Libre is all forged? Are you saying that the minutes of the Forum were invented by me, and I even had the refinement of writing them in Spanish? Oh, go lick soap.” [Olavo de Carvalho, in the article “Put on your pants”, Diário do Comércio, August 24, 2010, responding to the national director of the PT and executive secretary of the São Paulo Forum, Valter Pomar, who wanted, according to the author, “to foist on us, with the most bison-like face in the universe, the childish little lie that the FARC never participated in the Forum”].↩

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