This series of six 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”.
“Jesus and Stalin’s dove” discusses the relationship between reason, spirit, and feelings in guiding human conduct. It emphasizes the importance of subordinating feelings to reason and spirit, with reason being the pursuit of unity in the real world and spirit serving as the inspiration for seeking the ultimate Good.
“Education in Reverse” discusses the concept of education as a right versus a personal duty, using the lack of emphasis on self-education as a reason for Brazil’s poor performance in international tests.
“The Future of Boorishness” discusses the concept of “commonplaces” – stereotyped arguments stored in collective memory – and their impact on public opinion. These commonplaces can be intentionally created through slogans and repeated until their origins are forgotten, shaping people’s beliefs and reactions.
“The New Collective Imbecile” discusses the evolution of a concept called “The Collective Imbecile.” Originally referring to intelligent individuals corrupted by ideological influences, Olavo notes that the concept now applies to a new generation of internet-driven individuals aged 20 to 40. They have been influenced by different societal and cultural forces from their predecessors.
“Long Live Paulo Freire!” criticizes the educational methods of Paulo Freire, highlighting that his techniques were widely praised by communist parties and movements but did not lead to any significant reduction in illiteracy rates. Critics argue that Freire’s ideas lacked originality, were vague and repetitive, and failed to address practical implementation and potential manipulation of the masses. Olavo emphasizes that the critiques are not coming from right-wingers but rather from individuals who dedicated years to studying and following Freire’s teachings, suggesting that his “pedagogy of the oppressed” ultimately became an “oppression of pedagogy.” Despite this criticism, the article ironically approves of the posthumous recognition of Freire as the “patron of national education,” sarcastically highlighting the alignment of his educational philosophy with the decline in educational standards and academic performance in Brazil.
“Educating for Sissiness” discusses the concept of “sissiness” in the context of American education, particularly focusing on public schools. Olavo argues that there is a pervasive conditioning within the education system that promotes cowardice, weakness, and timidity, labeling it as a form of moral perfection. Olavo criticizes the education system for diminishing qualities like bravery and assertiveness, resulting in students who are vulnerable and paralyzed in the face of danger. Olavo highlights instances of school shootings and questions why more individuals didn’t take proactive measures to defend themselves and others. Olavo contrasts this perceived sissiness with historical conflicts and incidents where strength and courage were evident. The article also discusses how some individuals, such as security consultant Allen Hill, advocate for teaching boys to be braver and more aggressive to counteract criminal threats. Overall, the article emphasizes the negative impact of this perceived sissiness on the younger generation and criticizes certain aspects of American education while suggesting alternative approaches to fostering courage and self-defense.
Jesus and Stalin’s dove
O Globo, October 20, 2001
When Christ said, “Truly you love what you should hate, and you hate what you should love,” he taught in the most explicit way that feelings are not reliable guides to human conduct. Before we can use them as indicators of right and wrong, we must teach them what is right and wrong. Feelings only hold value when subordinated to reason and spirit.
Reason is not just logical thinking: reducing it to that is an idolatry of means over ends, which ends in a morbid fetishism. Reason is the sense of unity of the real, which translates into the pursuit of cohesion between experience and memory, perceptions and thoughts, actions and words, etc. Logical capability is a partial and limited expression of this sense. The aesthetic sense and the ethical sense are also expressions of it: the former longs for the unity of sensory forms, the latter for the unity between knowledge and action. All of this is reason.
Spirit is what inspires reason to seek the key to the unity of the world’s vision in the supreme Good of all things, and not in any accidental detail arbitrarily taken as a principle of universal explanation, as some philosophical schools do with language, others with history, others with the unconscious, and so on. The spirit is the pinnacle of the edifice of reason, through which it opens up to the sense of infinite Good, freeing itself from the temptation to become rigid in tragic or utopian fetishism.
Neither reason nor spirit impose themselves. We open ourselves to them willingly. The opening to reason essentially comes from charity, love for one’s neighbor, through which one renounces imposing their desire and accepts submitting to dialogue, testing, the sense of proportions, and, in short, the primacy of reality. The opening to reason is education. Education comes from ex ducere, which means leading outward. Through education, the soul frees itself from subjective imprisonment, from cognitive egocentrism inherent to childhood, and opens itself to the grandeur and complexity of reality. The goal of education is the attainment of maturity. The mature person — the spoudaios of which Aristotle speaks — is the one who has made their soul obedient to reason, making acceptance of reality their habitual state of mind and, by this means, becoming capable of guiding their community towards the good. This point is crucial: no one can lead the community on the path of good before becoming mature in Aristotle’s sense. Revolutionary leaders and intellectual activists are only immature individuals projecting their subjective desires, fears, and childish illusions onto the community, producing evil under the guise of good.
The opening to the spirit is an act of prior trust in the supreme good of existence, an act without which reason loses the upward impulse that animates it and, fleeing the infinite, becomes imprisoned in some pseudototality, even more alienating than initial subjective selfishness. The religious name for this act of trust is faith, but the trust that elevates reason to the pursuit of the infinite transcends the mere adherence to a particular creed and has more of an anthropological dimension: everything good that humans have done, they have done driven by faith and through reason.
Spirit and reason educate feelings. The feelings of the person matured by spirit and reason are different from those of the immature person, because the former loves what they should love and hates what they should hate, while the latter loves or hates blindly, according to the arbitrary inclinations of their subjectivity shaped by social pressures and attractions.
But what draws the soul towards the opening to spirit and reason is hope, and the awakening of hope is a mystery. People subjected to the harshest oppression and most tormenting suffering retain their hope, while others lose it at the first frustration of a foolish desire. Hope is not under our control. Its advent depends on the spirit itself, which blows where it wills. All human plots, whether in life or fiction, revolve around the mystery of hope.
Hope, faith, and charity educate feelings for the love of what should be loved. The idolatrous worship of feelings is a cognitive egocentrism, a Peter Pan complex that rejects maturity. The more a person seeks to assert their freedom through blind adherence to their feelings and desires, the more they become slaves to the ambient chatter. The path to freedom is upward, not downward. To free oneself is not to assert oneself: it is to transcend oneself.
Of the various forms of slavery to which humanity subjects itself through the worship of feelings, the worst is slavery to words. Through chatter, a person can be trained to have certain feelings and emotions triggered by the mere hearing of certain words, regardless of facts and context. Peace and war, for example, elicit automatic reactions. That’s why immature masses credulously accept new forms of government that promise to end wars and establish peace. But it’s only nominally that war means slaughter and peace means tranquility and security. Wars in the 20th century killed 70 million people. That’s a lot of people. But 180 million, more than twice that number, were killed by their own governments, in times of peace and in the name of peace. The mature person knows that the relationship between war and peace is ambiguous, that only a careful examination of the concrete situation allows one to discern the mixture of good and evil in each of them at any given moment. They know that the “dove of peace,” offered for childish adoration in schools, was a design commissioned to Pablo Picasso by Josef Stalin with the intention of having the symbol of Soviet “Pax” — the totalitarian social order built on slave labor, mass imprisonment, and genocide — overshadow, in the imagination of the people, the Christian symbol of the Holy Spirit. The mature person knows that, as much as the “dove of peace,” manifestos for peace, speeches for peace, and even masses for peace are often blasphemies and instruments of war. In the dictionary, the meanings of war and peace are clearly distinct, but the mature person does not retreat from the complexity of things in a childish appeal to verbal absolutes.
Equality, freedom, rights, order, security, and thousands of other words have also been instilled in the minds of the masses as computer programs to automatically trigger the desired emotions in them, causing them to love what they should hate and hate what they should love. Even hope, the key to faith and charity, becomes a weapon against the spirit when it becomes objectified in the expectation of a better world, a more just society, or ultimately, making more money. Jesus made it clear that it was none of these hopes that he brought. It was the hope of making each of us a new Christ, an incarnation and witness of the spirit. Those who accept less than that will only gain, instead of Christ’s peace, a UN flag with Stalin’s dove.
Education in Reverse
Diário do Comércio, January 27, 2009
By clicking on Google the word “education”, followed by the phrase “right of all”, I found 671,000 references. Just academic articles on the subject, 5,120. “Inclusive education” yields 262,000 results. Now try clicking “self-education is each person’s duty”: no results. “Self-education is everyone’s duty”: no results. “Self-education is the citizen’s duty”: no results.
This is enough to explain why Brazilian students always rank last in international tests. The idea that educating oneself is a duty seems never to have occurred to the enlightened minds that guide (or misguide) the shaping (or warping) of our children’s minds.
Here’s also the reason why, when my children asked me why they had to go to school, I could only answer them that if they didn’t, I would go to jail; so, they should endure that absurd ritual for the sake of their old father. I could never find another justification. I also advised them to only strive enough to get the minimum grades, not wasting more time with that nonsense. If they wanted to acquire culture, they should study at home, under my guidance. I have eight children. None of them are ignorant. But the most erudite of all, not coincidentally, is the one who attended school the least.
The idea that education is a right is one of the strangest that has ever passed through the human mind. It is only obsessive repetition that gives it some credibility. What is a right, after all? It’s an obligation someone has towards you. Cut off from the obligation it imposes on a third party, the right has no substance. It’s like saying children have the right to food without anyone having the obligation to feed them. The word “right” is just a euphemistic way of designating the obligations of others.
The others, in this case, are the people and institutions nominally tasked with “giving” education to Brazilians: teachers, pedagogues, ministers, intellectuals, and a multitude of bureaucrats. When these creatures say you have a right to education, they are simply stating an obligation that falls on themselves. So why do they turn it into an advertising campaign? Why publish advertisements that logically should only be read by themselves? Do they need to spend government money even to convince themselves of their own obligations? Or are they so lazy that they need to incite the population to pressure them into doing their duty? Every penny spent on such campaigns is an absurdity and a crime.
Moreover, the universal experience of genuine educators proves that the active subject of the educational process is the student, not the teacher, the school principal, or all the state bureaucracy combined. No one can “give” education to anyone. Education is a personal achievement, and it is only obtained when the drive for it is sincere, coming from the depth of the soul and not from an externally imposed obligation. No one educates against their own will, at least because studying requires concentration, and external pressure is the opposite of concentration. The most a student can receive from outside are the means and the opportunity to educate themselves. But that will be useless if they are not motivated to seek knowledge. Shouting in their ear that education is their right only prompts them to demand everything from others — from the State, from society — and nothing from themselves.
If there is one obvious thing in Brazilian culture, it’s the disdain for knowledge and the concurrent veneration for the titles and diplomas that provide access to good jobs. This has been a constant since the time of the Empire and has been amply documented in our literature. Under these conditions, advertising campaigns that emphasize education as a right to be claimed, and not as a duty to be fulfilled by the campaign’s recipient themselves, have a corrupting effect almost as serious as drug trafficking. They incite people to expect the government to give them the magic tool to climb the ladder of success without it implying, on their part, any love for studying, but only a desire for the diploma.
The Future of Boorishness
O Globo, December 2, 2000
A topos, or “commonplace”, is a snippet of collective memory where certain stereotyped arguments are stored, credibility guaranteed by mere association of ideas, regardless of the examination of the topic. Many commonplaces form spontaneously, through accumulated social experience. Others are intentionally created by the repetition of slogans, which become commonplaces when their artificial origins are forgotten and they permeate general mentality as self-evident truths.
Commonplaces are not a simple accumulation but are organized into a system that can be analyzed and described similarly to how a complex in psychoanalysis is studied. Knowing this allows one to predict, with reasonable accuracy, public reactions to certain ideas or words. Relying on these standardized responses, one can get opinions accepted or rejected without any scrutiny so that, at the mere mention of the relevant words, mental cataloging occurs automatically and judgment is made as quickly as fast food. The impression of unwavering certainty is then inversely proportional to the understanding of the topic, and the feeling of opining with full freedom is directly proportional to the degree of obedient automatism with which an idiot repeats what was dictated to them.
It’s clear that this indoctrination must begin early. Hence Antonio Gramsci’s emphasis on the importance of primary school. Some beliefs must be instilled wordlessly, through images or gestures, so they can’t be examined by reflective intelligence without a painstaking effort of concentration that few are willing to undertake. Thus, it is possible to consolidate such standardized and repetitive reactions that, in certain circumstances, a mere scoff or ironic smile functions as if it were the most convincing of mathematical proofs.
If people realized to what extent they humiliate and degrade themselves at the very moment they proudly believe they are exercising their freedom, they would not be so eager to voice their opinions or what they think they think. It is for the love of this kind of cheap freedom that young people, especially, are willing to serve revolutionaries who flatter them.
To truly ruin this country, the triumphant left doesn’t even need to establish a Cuban regime here. It suffices for them to do what they have already done: reduce millions of Brazilian youth to stupefied boorishness, a functional illiteracy where the words they read in their minds act like Pavlovian stimulations, evoking emotional reactions just by hearing them, directly and without reference to external reality.
For four decades, the shock troops stationed in schools have programmed these children to read and reason like dogs that drool or growl at mere signs, responding to the immediate sounds in their affective memory, without the slightest ability or interest in determining if these correlate to anything in the real world.
One of them hears, for example, the word “virtue”. The context hardly matters. Instantly, in their neural network, the associative chain is formed: virtue-morality-Catholicism-conservatism-repression-dictatorship-racism-genocide. And they start shouting: It’s the right! Kill! Flay! To the wall!
Conversely and complementarily, when they hear the word “social”, they begin to drool with pleasure, drawn by the magical appeal of the images: social-socialism-justice-equality-freedom-sex-and-free-cocaine-yay!
I am not exaggerating in the slightest. It is exactly this way, in blocks and consolidated engrams, that a stupefied youth reads and thinks. These people don’t even need socialism: they already live in it, they have already let themselves be reduced to the most abject mental slavery, already reacting with horror and disgust at the slightest attempt to bring them back to reason, repelling it as if it were a threat of rape. Such is the educational work of those who, thirty years ago, posed as the embodiment of enlightenment against the obscurantism they claimed was monopolized by the military government.
Thousands of pseudo-mystical sects, armed with neurolinguistic programming techniques and brainwashing, haven’t achieved this outcome. It was accomplished by educators paid by the Ministry of Education, imbued with the sublime conviction of being liberators and civilizers. The harm this has done to the country is already irreparable. Assuming that all these parrot trainers were fired today and a national intelligence rescue program began, thirty or forty years would pass before a reasonable average verbal comprehension could be restored. Two generations would be left behind, intellectually useless forever.
It’s partly because they are aware of this that these same educators are the first to advocate for drug legalization. They know that the wonderful welfare state they dream of will need to keep a good portion of the population idle, damaged, incapacitated, and dull. To prevent them from interfering in the productive machine, it will be necessary to remove them from the social space, move them to playful and fictitious worlds where the price of entry is a gram of powder. In the future society, the reward for those who agreed to be idiotized to bulk up militant numbers is already assured: free sniffs and shots under government auspices and the freedom to engage in public intercourse, under police protection, before an audience as indifferent as to the banal sight of a dog orgy around a lamppost.
But isn’t that precisely what they want? Isn’t this the essence of the socialist ideal that animates their hearts?
The New Collective Imbecile
Diário do Comércio, October 30, 2012
When, between the 1980s and 1990s, I began to draft the notes that would become The Collective Imbecile, the characters I referred to were intelligent individuals, reasonably cultured, but corrupted by ideological self-intoxication and by a party corporatism that, by elevating them to positions far beyond their merits, completely distorted their view of the universe and themselves. That’s why I defined them as “a group of people of normal or even superior intelligence who come together for the purpose of imbecilizing each other.”
This definition no longer applies to the new chatterboxes and commentators, mainly active on the internet1, and who are now between 20 and 40 years old. Like their predecessors, they are people of normal or superior intelligence separated from the full use of their gifts by the intervention of social and cultural forces. The difference is that these forces attacked them at a younger age and are not quite the same that harmed their predecessors.
Until the 1970s, Brazilians received in primary and secondary school a normal education, deficient as it may have been. They only became corrupted when they reached the university and, instead of a genuine exposure to high culture, received heavy doses of communist indoctrination, presented under the then-plausible guise of fighting for the restoration of democratic freedoms. The pressure of the environment, the imposition of vocabulary, and the highly selective control of themes and bibliography made it so that the acquisition of a cultured Brazilian status was identified, in each student’s mind, with the absorption of the leftist way of thinking, feeling, and being — in reality, nothing more than a set of mental habits.
The work of teacher-doctrinaires was complemented by the mainstream media, which, already largely dominated by leftist activists and sympathizers, surrounded the intellectuals and artists of their ideological preference with an aura of sublime prestige, while relegating to the dustbin of oblivion writers and thinkers deemed inconvenient, except when they could be exploited as exceptions that, due to their rarity and exoticism, confirmed the rule.
Created and maintained by universities, by the editorial movement, and by the printed media, the atmosphere of ideological imbecilization was, so to speak, a luxury product, accessible only to the middle and upper classes, leaving the popular mass untouched.
From the 1980s onwards, the leftist elite took over public education, introducing the “socioconstructivist” literacy system, designed by leftist educators like Emilia Ferrero, Lev Vygotsky, and Paulo Freire to implant in children’s minds cognitive structures apt for more or less spontaneous development of a socialist worldview, practically without the need for explicit “indoctrination.”
From the perspective of learning, student performance, and especially literacy, the results were catastrophic.
There’s no room here to explain the whole thing, but, in short, it’s like this. Every language consists of a more or less closed, stable, and mechanical part — the alphabet, spelling, the list of phonemes and their combinations, the basic rules of morphology and syntax — and an open, moving, and fluid part: the entire universe of meanings, values, nuances, and speech intentions. The former is primarily learned by memorization and repetitive exercises. The latter, by continuous intellectual enrichment, by accessing high culture goods, by using comparative, critical, and analytical intelligence, and, last not least, by practicing personal communication and expression skills. Without adequate mastery of the first part, it’s impossible to navigate the second. It’s like trying to jump and dance before learning to walk. This inversion is precisely what socioconstructivism imposes on students, expecting them to actively — and even creatively — participate in the “universe of culture” before having the basic tools necessary for verbal articulation of their thoughts, perceptions, and inner states.
Socioconstructivism blends literacy with content acquisition, socialization, and even the practice of critical reflection, making the process extremely complicated and, along the way, neglecting the acquisition of basic phonetic-syllabic skills without which no one can achieve sufficient language mastery.
The result of this pedagogical monstrosity is students who reach master’s and doctoral programs without basic spelling knowledge and with a limited ability to articulate experience and language. At the university, they learn to mimic the jargon of one or several academic specialties which, without a reasonable command of the general and literary language, they understand in a materialistic, almost fetishistic manner, often remaining insensitive to nuances of meaning and unable to grasp, in practice, the difference between a concept and a figure of speech. In general, they lack even a sense of “form,” both in what they read and what they write.
Implemented on a national scale, socioconstructivism resulted in a spectacular democratization of ineptitude, which today is distributed more or less equally among all young Brazilians, students or graduates, without distinctions of creed or ideology. The new collective imbecile, unlike the old one, does not have a party membership.
Long Live Paulo Freire!
Diário do Comércio, April 19, 2012
Do you know anyone who was taught by the Paulo Freire method? Has any of these rare creatures, if they exist, demonstrated competence in any area of technical, scientific, artistic, or humanistic activity? There’s no need to answer. Everyone already knows that, by the criterion of “by their fruits you shall know them,” the famous Paulo Freire is a complete unknown.
The techniques he invented were applied in Brazil, Chile, Guinea-Bissau, Puerto Rico, and other places. They did not produce any reduction in illiteracy rates anywhere.
However, they did produce a spectacular flourish of praise from all communist parties and movements worldwide. The man was celebrated as a genius, saint, and prophet.
This was at the beginning. The passing of the decades brought, despite all advertising, corporate, and party buffers, a reality check. Here are some conclusions reached by experience, by collaborators and admirers of Mr. Freire:
“There’s no originality in what he says, it’s the same old story. His alternative to the global perspective is musty rhetoric. He’s a political and ideological theorist, not an educator.” (John Egerton, “Searching for Freire”, Saturday Review of Education, April 1973.)
“He leaves basic questions unanswered. Couldn’t ‘conscientization’ be another way to anesthetize and manipulate the masses? What new social controls, other than mere verbalisms, will be used to implement his social policy? How does Freire reconcile his humanist and liberating ideology with the logical conclusion of his pedagogy, the violence of revolutionary change?” (David M. Fetterman, “Review of The Politics of Education”, American Anthropologist, March 1986.)
"[In Freire’s book] we don’t even get close to the so-called oppressed. Who are they? Freire’s definition seems to be ‘anyone who is not an oppressor’. Vagueness, redundancies, tautologies, endless repetitions provoke boredom, not action.” (Rozanne Knudson, Review of Pedagogy of the Oppressed; Library Journal, April 1971.)
“‘Conscientization’ is a project of upper-class individuals directed at the lower-class population. Added to this arrogance is the recurring irritation with ‘those people’ who stubbornly refuse the salvation so benevolently offered: 'How can they be so blind?’” (Peter L. Berger, Pyramids of Sacrifice, Basic Books, 1974.)
“Some see ‘conscientization’ almost as a new religion and Paulo Freire as its high priest. Others see it as pure emptiness and Paulo Freire as the main windbag.” (David Millwood, “Conscientization and What It’s All About”, New Internationalist, June 1974.)
"Pedagogy of the Oppressed does not help understand either revolutions or education in general.” (Wayne J. Urban, “Comments on Paulo Freire”, paper presented at the American Educational Studies Association in Chicago, February 23, 1972.)
“His apparent inability to take a step back and let the student experience critical intuition on their own terms reduced Freire to the role of an ideological guru floating above practice.” (Rolland G. Paulston, “Ways of Seeing Education and Social Change in Latin America”, Latin American Research Review. Vol. 27, no. 3, 1992.)
“Some people who worked with Freire are beginning to realize that his methods make it possible to be critical about everything except these methods themselves.” (Bruce O. Boston, “Paulo Freire”, in Stanley Grabowski, ed., Paulo Freire, Syracuse University Publications in Continuing Education, 1972.)
Other judgments of the same nature can be found on the page of John Ohliger, one of the many disillusioned devotees.2
There is not a single criticism signed by a rightist or someone unfamiliar with Freire’s practices. Only judgments from those who dedicated years of their life to follow the teachings of the man and saw with their own eyes that the pedagogy of the oppressed was, in the end, just an oppression of pedagogy.
I don’t say this to criticize the posthumous naming of this character as the “patron of national education”. On the contrary: I approve and warmly applaud the measure. No one better than Paulo Freire can represent the spirit of the PT’s (Worker’s Party) education, which placed our students in the last positions in international tests, removed our universities from the list of the best in the world, and reduced the number of citations of Brazilian academic works in international scientific journals to a minuscule number. Who could be against a decision so consistent with the educational traditions of the governing party? I even suggest that the tribute ceremony be presided over by former Minister of Education Fernando Haddad, the one who wrote “cabeçário” instead of “cabeçalho”, and have as master of ceremonies the main theorist of the Workers' Party, Dr. Emir Sader, who writes Getúlio with LH. Unless they prefer to call, for one of these roles, President Dilma Roussef herself, who couldn’t remember the title of the book that had impressed her so much the previous week, or former President Lula, who didn’t read books because they gave him a headache.
Educating for Sissiness
Diário do Comércio, April 23, 2007
Just as I had finished writing that the students in American schools are sitting ducks, one of the survivors of the Virginia Tech massacre appeared on the “Today” show on MSNBC, saying the same thing. But precisely this survivor, Zach Petkewicz, was neither a duck nor did he remain seated. He pushed a table against the door and prevented Cho Seung Hui from doing in his classroom what he had just done in the neighboring ones. He saved an entire class. Why did so few, among thousands of students, teachers, and staff, display the same presence of mind? Why didn’t anyone attack the crazy Korean while he was reloading his automatic pistol or locking the doors with chains?
My son Pedro, who patiently endured a year and a half in public school in Virginia, affirms: “It’s an education for sissies.” The English equivalent of the word is sissies. A sissy isn’t necessarily gay. Individuals who’ve never had a single homosexual impulse can be perfect sissies. Just teach them that the white heterosexual Christian American male is the most despicable creature on the face of the Earth and that, if he happens to be one of them, he should do his best to appear as something else. The luckier ones might come up with the ridiculous but harmless idea of wearing Afro braids with their blond hair. Others will attempt more assertive forms of adaptation—and among these, the most popular and politically correct is to become as timid, weak, and effeminate as possible. After a few years of this conditioning, the individual is ready to faint, have a hysterical fit, or be paralyzed with fear in the face of an aggressor, displaying even more vulnerability in the foolish hope of moving them.
In the face of the spectacle of collective pusillanimity at Virginia Tech, it’s impossible not to recall that chatty and self-important granny from Flannery O’Connor’s story A Good Man is Hard to Find, who, in front of the armed murderer who has just shot her entire family, clings to the idiotic belief until the very end that he is fundamentally a good man, incapable of harming her. More or less the same idea with which those nitwits from Viva Rio climbed the hill carrying flowers on “Kindness Day”—and were driven away with bullets.
There are brave gays and sissy heterosexuals. The quintessence of sissiness has nothing to do with sex. It’s an abject cowardice, an enervation of the soul, a visceral pusillanimity—which today’s educators consider the epitome of moral perfection, and which UN social engineers would like to spread throughout humanity. It’s the pedagogical formula used in American public schools. That’s why ChriFstian folks avoid them, preferring homeschooling. Boys educated at home only go to school at the end of the year to take exams and always score better than the fools who stayed there all year learning sissiness.
For blacks, women, gays, and members of “minorities” in general, the establishment employs a different, symmetrically inverse, corrupting recipe. It flatters them until they go crazy. It inflates their egos to divinization. It teaches them to believe they are owed by the universe, that merely speaking to an adult white person is an act of imperial generosity. The fact that blacks and Asians—those who came in Muslim troops, these in barbaric hordes—attacked and enslaved millions of Europeans centuries before the first Portuguese landed in Africa—is suppressed from history as if it had never happened. The white—and ironically, especially the American, of Western peoples the one who enslaved fewer people and for less time—is defined as naturally a slaver, the eternal slaver, heir of Cain, only worthy of life by special concession of the UN. Every page of the textbooks used in American schools insinuates these beliefs between the lines. Every time a teacher opens their mouth in the classroom, they spread more of this pedagogical narcotic into the young minds. The thing was evidently calculated to spoil souls, to feed hatred and resentment, to destroy the country through systematic dismantling.
All the prejudices that exist in the world arose spontaneously from conflicts among human beings. Now, for the first time in history, there’s planned prejudice, mathematically calculated by behavioral engineers and inoculated with pedagogical technique refinements into the heads of the kids. That’s why there’s a real abyss between generations here. People forty years and older are friendly, helpful, generous, and patriotic. The young are insufferable whiners, all the more pretentious and arrogant, the more dependent they are, incapable of taking care of themselves and defending themselves in difficult situations. Of course, I’m speaking of those who were educated in public schools. Those who don’t want to end up like them seek refuge in conservative private schools (which are plentiful but expensive), in churches, in homeschooling, and in the Armed Forces.
A few years ago, the writer Christina Hoff Sommers, in The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men,3 already warned against the planned sissiness epidemic that feminist educators and psychologists, disarmament proponents, pacifists, gay activists, etc., were putting together, many of them imbued with the lofty mission of taming, through widespread castration, the “American culture of violence”—a Hollywood stereotype in whose reality they believed wholeheartedly, simply because it was invented by feminists, disarmament proponents, pacifists, gay activists like them. Asinum asinus fricat, as the Romans observed: the donkey rubs against the donkey—an leftist idiot invents a defamatory legend, the others take it deadly seriously, and soon there are thousands of university theses on the subject, with an air of profound social science, and technical committees paid a fortune by benevolent foundations to create ingenious solutions. The result is Cho Seung Hui. Each of these boys who suddenly start killing people at random is filled with hatred for the country that has given them everything. Tim McVeigh wanted to bring down the system, the Columbine boys were gay and intoxicated with anti-Christian rhetoric, Cho Seung Hui dreamed of becoming an Ishmaelite avenger to shatter the West. Each one was educated and indoctrinated to do what they did. While some enlightened intellectuals were instilling in him the desire for revenge against those who had never harmed him, others were passing laws disarming teachers and staff in schools, priests and pastors in churches. Some were psychologically preparing the murderer, others were tying the victims' hands. Have you noticed that armed invaders with pistols and rifles only attack churches and schools? Have you heard of any of them invading a hunting club, a shooting range, a National Rifle Association assembly? There, the principle of loco si, pero no tonto prevails. The country is full of duck-shooting ranges—and the Zach Petkewiczes are becoming increasingly rare. And then those who deliberately created this situation diagnose the phenomenon as a product of “American culture,” recommending more civilian disarmament, more anti-Americanism, more compulsory effeminacy of youth in schools. They retroactively exploit their own wickedness for publicity. It’s the infallible recipe of revolutionary propaganda: “Accuse them of what you are, blame them for what you do.”
But people around here have already started to catch on to the trick, albeit with a bit of delay. Allen Hill, a security consultant interviewed on the same program that featured Zach Petkewicz’s episode, boldly stated that schools need to teach boys to be braver and more aggressive: “Criminals are counting on Americans to stay seated and do nothing. The bad guys plan their attacks. Schools have to plan their defense and respond with equal aggression. The training must be as intensive and taken as seriously as the killer takes his mission to kill.”
There’s a South American country that, if it heeded this advice, might not suffer from 50,000 homicides per year. With a difference: there, the young are not so weak. Sissiness is widespread among adult men in the streets, factories, offices. These people are afraid of guns even when viewed from the handle side. And the government, Rede Globo, and Folha de S. Paulo want to instill even more fear in them. It’s a much more desperate situation than that of Americans. With double the Brazilian population, the US has five times fewer violent crimes than Brazil.
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Editor’s Note: See the Discussion chapter.↩
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See http://www.bmartin.cc/dissent/documents/Facundo/Ohliger1.html.↩
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New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.↩
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