This series of 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”.
In "The Origin of Dominant Opinions", Olavo critiques the superficiality of modern opinion-makers who form and cling to opinions without substantial knowledge or self-awareness. He argues that their opinions are mere reflections of societal formulas rather than genuine personal insights, contributing to a decline in intellectual rigor and public morality.
In "Brazilian Debaters", Olavo discusses the Brazilian propensity for argumentation, often characterized by a shallow understanding of logic. He criticizes debaters who skip foundational training in language and comprehension, instead relying on simplistic logical rules to attack opponents, which leads to illusory triumphs rather than meaningful discourse.
In "Debate and Prejudice", Olavo examines how debates in Brazil are driven by prejudice and the manipulation of public opinion rather than genuine scientific rationality. He points out that debaters often distort opponents' views to quickly garner public support, thus reducing debates to mere confrontations of biased impressions rather than thorough examinations of ideas.
In "Zeno and the Paralytic", Olavo reflects on the decline of intellectual competence in Brazilian debates. He observes that many debaters cannot distinguish between concepts and figures of speech, resulting in a superficial understanding of topics. This leads to a culture where the ability to articulate feelings is mistaken for genuine knowledge.
In "Mental Barbarism", Olavo recounts an incident where a baseless and offensive attack in an online discussion was defended under the guise of intellectual argumentation. He highlights this as a symptom of a broader decline in moral and intellectual standards, where even the most absurd claims are treated with undue seriousness, undermining rational discourse.
The Origin of Dominant Opinions
Diário do Comércio, October 24, 2005
The presumptuous idiot, that is, the most representative type of any profession nowadays, including literature, teaching, and journalism, forms opinions immediately and spontaneously, based on an insignificant or zero amount of knowledge, and clings to his judgment with the tenacity of someone defending a treasure greater than life itself. Strictly speaking, he does not have proper opinions. He only has vague impressions which, not being able, of course, to find adequate expression, mechanically accommodate themselves to any formula of analogous sense, picked from the environment, and then seem to him to be personal opinions, as if the conquest of an authentic personal opinion did not require effort.
The mental trajectory that led him to his unwavering preferences completely escapes him, having been traveled on the margins of conscious attention. Literally, he does not know why or how he came to think the way he thinks. When asked about the path by which he arrived at such and such conclusions, he never responds with a recollective introspection, as a serious intellectual would try to do. He improvises two or three justifications and retroactively incorporates them into his self-image, believing he has always thought that way. Confusing the present with the past, his mental autobiography is fictitious, hence always ready to be altered and justify anything. When the justifications become routine and more or less coincide with things heard or read, they produce a feeling of coherence and solidity.
It is no wonder that, faced with a disagreeable opinion, he instantly believes it was formed like his own: from emotional preference to the judgment of facts, never the other way around. And when we show him some of the data and comparisons we laboriously gathered to think as we do, he imagines we are merely inventing pretexts at random, on the spot, to defeat and humiliate him, to impose our subjective choices, our blind beliefs, our “dogmas,” as he so easily labels them without noticing that he inverts the meaning of the word. Unable to recall his own inner journey, how could he imaginatively relive ours? The more well-founded the reasons we present, the more he understands them as externalizations of an irrational will. And, evidently, if it happens that our opinions are minority and unusual, and his backed by the common belief of a social group, then his radical misunderstanding of our arguments is reinforced by the feeling of being the voice of reason fighting against blind fanaticism and madness. At such moments he may resort to conventional praise of “doubt” and “relativism,” which, detached from the corresponding inner experience, become effective vaccines against the invitation to Socratic self-examination. He may also, if he feels harassed and insecure, issue a psychiatric diagnosis about us, using some newly heard technical term, which although totally out of place in the situation—and sometimes from the proper sense of the word—will give him a comforting sense of normality and, in general, end the discussion.
This is how the brain of a typical Brazilian “opinion maker” works today. Diligence in the search for truth, constant self-examination, the struggle with the complexity of facts and the obscurity of one’s own soul are totally unknown to him. The true foundation of his opinions is his lack of self-awareness. His social utility and the reason for his success lie in the fact that he keeps circulating the stock of conventional formulas, making them available to other intellectually passive individuals who need them to poorly dress their own subjective impressions and acquire with that an illusion that they know what they are talking about. The mere imitative assimilation of “cultured” language thus becomes the complete substitute for education towards knowledge. Such formed people do not say what they perceive nor judge what they say: they believe in what they manage to say, simply because they would not know how to say anything else.
The course of historical events reflects the dominant type of personality in each era, and the clearest expression of the dominant personality is the style of intellectual life. The abysmal decline of public morality in Brazil is not causa sui: it was preceded and prepared in schools, newspapers, and book publishers. Intellectual activity in Brazil has deteriorated and prostituted to such an extent that even the formal discourse of journalism and academic communication—let alone what was once literature—no longer serves as an instrument for self-awareness. The language of advertisers and political campaigners has taken over everything. The uproar of simulating good feelings and demonizing the enemy by the easiest route blocks any possibility of serious reflection on one’s own words. The subject reads what he wrote yesterday and does not realize that today he is writing the opposite. The impression of the moment is everything, the sense of autobiographical continuity—not to mention logical consistency—dissolves into a minimalist succession of disconnected flashes. With it goes any aspiration of intellectual responsibility, even vague and remote. The emotional cohesion of the group—as inconsistent in its ideas as any of the individuals that compose it—becomes the advantageous substitute for coherence. Advantageous because it requires no effort and instills in the subject an impression of absolute and unquestionable solidity, while all genuine coherence is a precarious balance generated in the struggle to overcome contradictions. Now there are no more contradictions. They have been abolished by group solidarity, where changing in unison becomes a kind of continuity, the only possible under such circumstances.
This state of affairs is reflected in a thousand and one details of daily life. One of the most interesting of recent times is the ease and dexterity with which journalists, intellectuals, and leftist politicians, until yesterday firmly aligned with whatever came from the PT government, suddenly appear railing against civilian disarmament and making the apology of “individual rights” as if they had always thought so, as if they had not actively collaborated, with devout obedience, in the construction of the PT Golem and the dissolution of the individual in collectivist statism. Luis Fernando Verissimo, Jô Soares, Mauro Santayana, and the entire PSTU repeating with the greatest naturalness arguments that seem directly taken from the bulletins of the National Rifle Association are examples of the infinite plasticity of character of the national leftist elite, a phenomenon I cannot explain to Americans in any way.
At least the PSTU crowd had the prudence to cushion the hypocritical change with a compensatory lie: they invented that disarmament is a dirty trick by the Americans to facilitate the invasion of national territory, and with a firm sense of coherence they went out vociferating the apology of the “No” as if they were faithfully persevering in a doctrine already reiterated a thousand times.1
Brazilian Debaters
Diário do Comércio, August 20, 2012
If there is one thing Brazilians love, it is to argue. They especially like to uncover contradictions in others' discourse, displaying them with the triumphant air of having caught their opponent with their pants down. The name of those who dedicate themselves to this is legion. They use elementary notions of logic, which reveal to them the secrets of syllogistic coherence and allow them to easily perceive where consequences do not follow from premises or cry, poor things, for a missing premise. Based on this, the debater can, without any inhibition, throw in the opponent’s—or victim’s—face accusations of “sophistry” and “fallacy,” words that nowadays are among the most popular in electronic debates. To make matters worse, they add the names of the 27 eristic stratagems of Arthur Schopenhauer, which I had the unfortunate idea to publish and comment on in Portuguese,2 in the illusion that readers would use them to correct themselves instead of tormenting their neighbors.
At a time when everyone names themselves an infallible inspector of others' coherence, it is worth reminding the distinguished that Aristotle himself, inventor or first formulator of the rules of logic and Sophistical Refutations, warned that these instruments are worthless without a long preliminary training in the arts of language and the exercise of comprehension. With great prudence, he prefixed the learning of syllogistics (and its unnatural sister, sophistics) with treatises on interpretation, categories (or types of predicates), antepredicaments (or levels of predication), the psychology of discourse (or rhetoric), and the art of distinguishing between real and apparent contradictions (topics, or dialectics). At the top of all this, he placed the technique of coherent scientific discourse, which he called analytics, later called “logic.”
Skipping all this preliminary learning, as if one were leaping directly from the ground floor to the fifth floor without using the stairs or the elevator, our debaters believe they can measure and judge the coherence of others' discourse without needing to have the correct perception of nuances of meaning, levels of predication (categorical, modal, hypothetical, etc.), variations of meaning according to audience and situation of discourse, and finally, the dialectical play where what seems absurd in one aspect is an obvious truth in another.
Logic is a kind of Euclidean geometry of discourse. Aristotle teaches that it only applies directly to formal scientific discourse, where nuances, colors, poetic ambiguities, and figures of speech of everyday speech and literary writing have already been eliminated by arduous work of conceptual purification and reduction of everything to stable and uniform meanings.
Ignoring this obviousness, which would throw the heavy burden of serious training in the arts of language onto their shoulders, the logicians of the blogosphere, as well as Orkut and Facebook, gather easy but perfectly illusory triumphs, pointing out “fallacies” and “sophistries” in what they do not understand.
They do this because the rules of logic, despite the obscurity of their explicit technical formulation, are the simplest, most schematic, and even instinctive in human thought, something like elementary arithmetic, where the four operations, once learned, can continue to be applied automatically to ever larger numbers without the need for any supplementary learning. Although it is, from the point of view of formal coherence, at the top of the hierarchy of discourses, logic corresponds, in fact, to the most crude and elementary level of thought. A cat, when preparing for a jump, evaluates the proportion between the height of the obstacle and the thrust force his legs will have to invest in the endeavor. This corresponds, schematically, to a trigonometric equation, which is a type of syllogistic reasoning. This skill the cat shares with other smart animals like dogs and lions, but also with some not so notable for intelligence, like horses and sheep. But no cat has ever managed to distinguish a figure of speech from a formal concept, grasp nuances of meaning according to the relationship between speaker and listener, and much less deal with two contradictory propositions that are both true in different senses. This is why internet debaters prefer to stick to the easy automatism of logical rules, applying them shallowly and stupidly to polyvalent and polysemic discourses that, to lend themselves to that, would have to go through a complex and difficult work of literary interpretation, deep comprehension, and conceptual formalization. Work that sometimes turns out to be completely impossible.
This is also why I advise my students not to enter the study of more technical philosophical areas and more dependent on logic before acquiring a solid universal literary culture, mastery of several languages, a refined sense of figures of speech, and, finally, an adequate understanding of what they read. As can already be seen from the grammar errors that swarm in their sentences like tadpoles around mother frog, the inspectors of others' coherence abstain from this precaution and believe they can make their way in the world of intellectual debates armed solely with logical automatisms within the reach of a cat or a donkey.
Debate and Prejudice
Diário do Comércio, June 25, 2012
It is illusory to expect scientific rationality to prevail in a confrontation involving many interests and passions, but it is not too much to wish that some capable people follow and judge the debate from a less biased and more compatible point of view with the current state of knowledge.
The number of such people is, certainly, minimal. What is observed in current disputes is that each faction, in the effort to win the adhesion of the uneducated and distracted populace, seeks not only to simplify its ideas and proposals, compressing them into a few slogans and clichés that can be repeated until they impregnate the subconscious of the multitude as categorical imperatives but also to further simplify those of the opposing party, reducing them to a caricatural scheme proper to arouse misunderstanding and repugnance. For the practical purposes of legislative dispute, it is important that both adherence and repulsion be achieved as quickly as possible, bypassing in-depth discussions that could dampen the audience’s convictions or dangerously delay their decision-making. This implies that the opponent’s ideas can never be objectively examined on their own terms and according to their own intentions, but must always be deformed to appear so repulsive that the mere temptation to give them a benevolent examination sounds itself repulsive, unacceptable, indecent.
The debate thus conducted is, therefore, always and necessarily a confrontation of prejudices, in the most literal and etymological sense of the term. This sense contrasts shockingly with the polemical use of the term in the course of the debate itself as an infamous label. Labeling the opponent’s ideas as “prejudices,” implying they are nothing more than irrational and unfounded positions, is, in most cases, just a pretext for not having to examine the reasons that underpin them, much less the possibility that they were born from good intentions. What is called “debate” is therefore no confrontation of ideas, but a mere contest of positive and negative impressions, a stage play.
It is also natural that, precisely because of this, the debaters seek to shelter under the protection of “science,” but no accumulation of statistical data, no load of academic citations or even scientifically valid claims in themselves will give any scientific legitimacy to an argument if it does not include the faithful reproduction and scientific discussion of antagonistic arguments. Science is, by definition, the confrontation of hypotheses: if, instead of being extensively examined, opposing opinions are evaded, caricatured, deformed, or dismissed in limine from the discussion under some pretext, it is of little use to adorn your own with the most beautiful scientific reasons in the world. Science is not done by accumulating convergent opinions but by laboriously seeking the truth among divergent views.
The test of the scientific dignity of an argument lies precisely in the patient objectivity with which it examines opposing arguments. Anyone who dismisses them outright as “prejudices” does nothing more than try to create a prejudice against them, discouraging the audience from examining them.
That the people most inclined to use this tactic are generally the ones who most proclaim “diversity,” “tolerance,” and “respect for divergent opinions” should not necessarily be interpreted as conscious hypocrisy, but often as a symptom of a rather severe cognitive deformity; a deformity that, by affecting influential people and opinion makers, risks bringing harm to the entire society.
When I say “cognitive deformity,” this should not be understood in the sense of mere morally harmless intellectual deficiency. The refusal to examine others' opinions on their own terms and according to their original intentions is equivalent to the refusal to see a human face in the adversary, the compulsion to reduce him to the state of a thing, a material obstacle to be removed. This compulsion is of a properly psychopathic nature.3 When legitimized in the name of beautiful humanitarian pretexts, it becomes an even more dehumanizing force, as it removes moral conduct from the field of concrete psychic life to that of simple adherence to a political group or ideological program. The human being then ceases to be judged good or bad by their personal acts and feelings, but by adhering to the faction previously self-defined as the monopolistic holder of good intentions—faction dispensed, therefore, from granting the adversary the dignity of understanding attention. The direct perception of human motivations is then replaced by a mechanical system of stereotyped reactions, highly predictable and controllable. And when the program has already become so widespread in the media, in the education system, and in the current vocabulary that it no longer needs to present itself explicitly as such but sounds like the impersonal and neutral voice of common sense, then the preventive dehumanization of the adversary becomes the usual and dominant procedure in public debates.
It goes without saying that this state of affairs has been in force in Brazil for at least a decade. We are in the full empire of psychopathic manipulation of public opinion.
Zeno and the Paralytic
O Globo, January 20, 2001
When I say that the level of consciousness of our speaking classes has already reached the calamitous range, I am not exaggerating or joking. I regularly follow political debates, read the main cultural publications, and receive dozens of emails daily from university students raising discussions on a thousand and one subjects: I have a good sample of what is going on. Six years ago it was still possible to document, through selected examples, as I did in the two volumes of The Collective Idiot, the rapid rise of stupidity in the national intelligentsia. Today anyone trying a similar collection would be crushed under the mass of documents. But this state of affairs does not fail to have its advantages. The greatest of these is that, due to the accumulation of material, the initial confusion of data gives way to the clear outline of some constants: the set of quirks and incompetencies that today characterizes the forma mentis of the typical national opinionator can already be described in a few lines.
The first characteristic is the absolute inability to distinguish between a concept and a figure of speech. When we have a vague feeling about something we do not understand well, we naturally experience the difficulty of expressing it. A figure of speech, appealing to suggestive similarities, helps us overcome the difficulty. We emerge from a nebulous isolation and enter the current of public conversation. The resulting sensation of having emerged from darkness into light is, however, totally illusory: greater mastery of expression does not mean better knowledge of the object of which we speak; entry into collective chatter does not mean contact with reality. Almost every public debater in this country, when he manages to tame his difficulty of expression, feels he has said something “objective,” perhaps even evident and self-proving when in fact he has only objectified his subjectivity. The more arduous the expressive challenge, the more deceptive the victory. The liberation from inner mists, the ability to express what we feel, is certainly a prerequisite for objective knowledge, but still far from achieving it. In Brazil, it tends to replace it. The confusion between speaking and knowing is an established rule of national debates.
Under these conditions, any pretense of “concept,” when it appears, is exhausted in mere nominal definition. The process of examination by which the investigator, criticizing his figures of speech, ends up grasping something of the real thing through the cracks of what he himself said about it seems to be completely unknown in this part of the world. The figurative and approximate expression, instead of being just the beginning of the investigation process, is its end: the subject has barely enunciated a vague problem and believes he already has a conclusive answer.
I would not say, however, that this ineptitude arises from an excessive affection for words, erroneously pointed out as a trait of our culture by foreign observers like James Bryce and Hermann Keyserling. What makes us take words for things is not the love for the former, but the difficulty of reaching the latter through them. Business anthropology research has shown that our population is insensitive to the written word, needing the support of gestures and sounds for the message to reach consciousness. But this dependence on the physical presence of the sender also marks a difficulty in jumping over the concrete situation of the dialogue and directly grasping the things and relationships mentioned. What is captured in this type of communication is less something about the external reality than the intentions and feelings of the speaker. The Brazilian tends to grasp first “what they want from him” rather than the quid of the thing spoken of. Say what you will, about anything, and he will hear an order, a request, an appeal, a stimulus, a prohibition. It is natural that, hearing this way, he also speaks this way, that is, in a situation that requires describing facts and beings, he sticks to expressing what he feels, without even noticing the difference between one thing and another. His speech will then be responded to in the same key, and so on indefinitely, in a kind of collective solipsism in which souls, the more they open up to each other, the more they close in their subjectivist illusion.
Hence the compulsive need to “take a position” before and independently of knowing the things in question, as well as the impossibility of hearing an argument or proof except as a more elaborate expression of a subjective “position-taking.”4 In Brazil, ideas, theories, visions of reality are not discussed: “positions”—attitudes, preferences, tastes, and dislikes—are discussed. If what Henry James said is true, that “gentlemen talk about things; slaves, about people,” then we are, indisputably, a nation of slaves.
It is evident that, not reaching the level of conceptual thought, it becomes even more impossible to prove anything. Hence the second characteristic of the Brazilian debater today: the complete ignorance of what a proof or demonstration is, indeed a total unconsciousness of the need for proofs. Instead of proof, we have emphatic reiteration or the appeal to new figures of speech that, by their emotional charge, suffice to establish a harmony between the feelings of the listener and those of the audience, without even remotely touching the objects in question. And the subject who did this leaves persuaded that he has said something about the real world.
Curiously, individuals who know nothing of the criteria of proof in philosophy or science are well updated with the limitations of these criteria, pointed out by authors in vogue. As a result, the limitation becomes a substitute for the criterion itself and is, in turn, absolutized, with great comfort for the presumptuous ignoramus who, precisely because he has proven nothing, believes he is at the peak of epistemological evolution—like a paralytic who, upon hearing of Zeno’s arguments about the impossibility of movement, felt superior to people able to walk.
Mental Barbarism
Jornal do Brasil, February 15, 2007
The other day, in an internet discussion, a young man who occasionally writes political articles assured that all the saints and prophets of Christianity only wanted power and money, that Jesus was born from adultery, and that the Jews are a nation of thieves.
Pretending not to notice how offensive and even criminally actionable these statements were, the individual still had the nerve to play the wounded maiden when I responded with the few curses that came to mind at the moment, to which I would add another dozen after reflecting more thoroughly on the conduct of the aforementioned and measuring the extent of his scoundrelity.
To top it off, the guy exempted himself from offering any proof of the three accusations besides the fact that he had read them in Voltaire, and then placed the burden of refuting them with facts and arguments on Christians and Jews, proclaiming that they would be guilty of intellectual dishonesty if they did not. How can one respond politely to a prejudiced and hateful attack reinforced by a cynical inversion of the burden of proof? Curses, as I understand it, were invented precisely for situations where a polite response would be complicity with the intolerable.
Incredibly, some students rushed to the insolent’s aid, consoling him for the mistreatment suffered from his foul-mouthed opponent, so lacking in “arguments.”
In today’s Brazil, it is like this: any stupid accusation thrown into the air without the slightest backing arrogates the intellectual dignity of an “argument” and demands courteous response from those whose feelings it just cruelly and ruthlessly wounded.
Inciting repulsion while at the same time suffocating its expression, this trick traps the interlocutor in a verbal straitjacket, maliciously using the very rules of polite debate as pieces of a malicious and sadistic psychological trap. It is a trick invented by Nazi and communist propaganda, but, nêfte paíf, it has become a usual procedure in public discussions today.
The episode, irrelevant in itself, is quite significant of the present state of intellectual barbarism. Talking about a “cultural crisis” under these circumstances is an understatement. At a time when a teenage sociopath can shred a boy’s body and still be defended as a victim of capitalism, the elementary discernment of right and wrong has already become an operation too complex for Brazilian brains. In small as in great matters, the same grandiloquent stupidity, the same mental brutality adorned with beautiful pretexts prevails.
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Editor’s Note: This article was published the day after the referendum of October 23, 2005, whose question for popular consultation was as follows: “Should the sale of firearms and ammunition be prohibited in Brazil?” The complicated formulation of the question confused many Brazilians at the time, as it was necessary to say “yes” or “no” to a “prohibition,” and the prohibition was still related to commerce, not the freedom of citizens to buy weapons. With 59,109,265 votes (63.94%) against 33,333,045 (36.06%), the “No” (that is: the sale of firearms and ammunition should not be prohibited in Brazil) won over the “Yes.”↩
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Editor’s Note: Olavo de Carvalho refers to the book How to Win a Debate Without Having to Be Right (Topbooks, 1997), by Arthur Schopenhauer, translated and commented on by him.↩
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See the excellent interview with psychiatrist Ana Beatriz Barbosa Silva at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_wUDsshdvk. [Editor’s Note: Interview given to Patricya Travassos, on the program “Alternativa Saúde” of the GNT channel.]↩
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Editor’s Note: “In Brazil today, this is what is called ‘reading’. First, attributing intentions to the author and arguing with them, not with him. Second, translating the text into the imperative mode, interpreting it as if it were the expression of a desire or order, an attempt to interfere with reality and not to understand it. I already explained years ago that, of the famous three functions of language classified by Karl Bühler, Brazilians only knew two: the expressive (manifesting inner states) and the appealative (influencing people). The denotative function (describing and analyzing reality) was totally unknown in this part of the world, and whoever committed the imprudence of speaking or writing something in that key would be automatically translated into the other two” [Olavo de Carvalho, “The Ugly Duckling of National Politics,” published in Diário do Comércio on March 19, 2007, and available at the link: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/070319dc.html].↩
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