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 “Self-Explanation”, Olavo reflects on his personal journey away from socialism, describing the liberating process of dismantling youthful ideological lies in adulthood. He emphasizes the existential satisfaction of rejecting false ideals, likening this process to Pinocchio becoming a real boy, and criticizes those who never fully abandon socialism, mistaking it for a lost ideal rather than a deceptive ideology.
In “Recycled Idiots”, Olavo discusses how many former leftist militants, after abandoning communism, transition into “useful idiots” for the left. He explains that these individuals fail to fully sever their ties with leftist ideology, instead seeking refuge in the “democratic left,” where they become susceptible to manipulation by their former comrades. Olavo critiques this superficial break with communism, arguing that many remain trapped in self-deception.
In “Doing My Duty”, Olavo critiques the communist mentality that reduces all political critique to partisan motives. He argues for the importance of independent thought, free from ideological labels, and emphasizes the need to criticize wrongdoing without aligning with a specific political side. Olavo also claims that in Brazil, there is no true right-wing movement, only leftist dominance in both the government and opposition.
In “Why I Am Not a Liberal”, Olavo distinguishes between conservatism and liberalism, critiquing the liberal tendency to prioritize market freedom over moral principles. He argues that while both ideologies value freedom, conservatives ground it in traditional moral values, whereas liberals see it as a contractual right, even allowing for morally questionable actions like euthanasia. Olavo positions conservatism as a defense of Judeo-Christian values, while liberalism, in his view, dissolves these values through market logic.
Self-Explanation
Época, July 14, 2001
Since there is only one columnist who regularly writes against socialism in the national press, and since the peculiar socialist concept of democracy demands that there be none, all tricks — from defamation to threats, from mockery to the affectation of superior silence — have already been tried to persuade this one to change the subject. The latest trend is to flatter him, praise his style, stroke his ego until his critical judgment is completely softened, and then, when he is defenseless and melted in a sea of flattery, to throw the fatal insinuation point-blank: “Give up.”
A similar suggestion sometimes comes from good people, with no malicious intent. It is in the look and tone that one discerns, in others, the intention to silence the columnist.
Unfortunately, that columnist is me. I say “unfortunately” because, with someone else, the ruse might work. With me, however, it has no chance whatsoever, as I am an impervious and tough soul, with no other ambition in life but to do exactly what I have been doing.
You — and I am speaking to my self-serving flatterers, not to my other readers, of course — have no idea how good it feels, for someone who helped build a lie in his youth, to be able to dismantle it in maturity, brick by brick, with the sadistic meticulousness of a demolisher who is not content to knock down walls but wants to go all the way to the foundation, pulling up the last stone from the base and leaving the land clean and bare as it was before construction began.
Being able to do that is a liberation, a relief, an earthly anticipation of eternal peace. Nothing you could offer me is worth that. Nothing. Much less flattery, which is the most unstable and inflated of currencies.
But do not think that when I speak of liberation, I am referring to repentance, in the moral sense of the term. The liberation I speak of is not only moral; it is existential, ontological. It is to discover and prove, daily, that human life does not have to be a cardboard theater, that it can be fully real, that a man can move from self-deception and inner farce to a true existence, like Pinocchio becoming a real boy of flesh and blood.
In these circumstances — to repeat Oscar Wilde — telling the truth is more than a duty: it is a pleasure. More than a pleasure, it is an authentic exaltation of the soul, which, in descending from illusion to facts, discovers for the first time the dimension of height and depth, the real stature of the spirit. It is a descent that is an ascent, if you understand me.
But you do not understand, do you? People like you cannot conceive of the abandonment of illusions except — very stereotypically — as a trade of the beautiful ideals of youth for the raw and selfish realism of maturity. Not seeing what in those ideals is pure vanity and arrogance, pure lust for power camouflaged in beautiful words, you cannot understand the legitimate idealism in the mature sacrifice of youthful lies. Those who, abandoning socialism, fell into cynical bitterness or opportunism have not truly abandoned it. They are its slaves and will be so eternally. They worship it in an inverted image: still seeing good in it and only lamenting that it is an impossible good, they adhere to reality as one who, after long resistance, yields to a degrading temptation. They leave socialism as one betrays a god without ceasing to love him.
These people understood nothing. Socialism was never a god or an ideal. It was a demonic lie and an exploitation of the vanity of the masses. Abandoning it is not losing an ideal: it is regaining life, soul, a sense of duty, and the dignity of the human mission.
It is to show this good to those who still do not know it that I write against socialism. You, who know nothing of this, may attribute to me the most absurd motives: hatred, envy, resentment, fanaticism, the devil. I do not care. I know what I am doing, and you do not know what you are saying.
Recycled Idiots
Jornal do Brasil, July 31, 2008
It took me decades to understand that leftist seduction did not conquer me — nor my generation of companions — through the active content of its ideological proposal, which we only knew very superficially, but rather through the implicit offer of a new code of morality, which came to us without words, through diffuse impregnation in daily interaction. What defined this style was that our actions would no longer be judged by their objective moral content, but by their hypothetical connection to the ultimate ends of the revolutionary movement. Since these ends were far off and accessible only poetically, the feelings of the militant group became the only reference capable of deciding, without great rational foundation or necessity, whether our personal conduct fit the expected standards. We freed ourselves from “bourgeois morality” by enslaving ourselves to the irrational authority of a circle of “comrades,” whose affection became the sole guarantor of the salvation of our souls before the tribunal of history. The attachment to the group was strengthened by the hatred of enemies we did not know, of whom we knew nothing, but about whom we could easily imagine the worst, delighting in belonging to the community of the good.
If I understood that things happened this way, it was through frankly humiliating self-examinations. Humiliating, but necessary. Considering the extent and gravity of the crimes committed by communism against the human species, the most obvious duty of those disillusioned with it is to deepen the rupture, investigating within themselves until they eradicate the last roots of the monstrous error in which they were complicit. However, few do this: most limit themselves to transitioning from the category of militants to that of useful idiots — sometimes even more useful than they were as militants.
The main reason for this is that abandoning communism cost them a great psychological investment: in the next moment, they are too tired for a second effort of self-overcoming. They then settle into the nearest circle, the so-called “democratic left,” and there they rest in the contemplation of their two great imaginary merits: adhering to communism out of love for justice; distancing themselves from it in search of more justice. Taking refuge from one lie in another, they become easily blackmailed by their old comrades, whose friendship they insist on preserving as a relic of a cherished past or as an analgesic against the pain of ideological separation.
The price of this friendship is a third lie. From the communist perspective, the idea of personal relationships separate from party devotion is a contemptible bourgeois myth. The newly divorced must forget this to pretend that their former comrades are now their friends with no political interest, while those comrades, faithful to the command never to place the affections of the heart above the sacred interests of the Party, are eager for an opportunity to use the new “fellow traveler” politically to give moral meaning to a friendship that, without this, would seem to them a sinful frivolity.
This opportunity arises as soon as the Party creates another “broad front,” as it does from time to time, garnering support from a variety of opinion currents for objectives whose long-term implications the majority need not see or understand. The wayward militant can hardly resist the proposal to please his youthful companions while retaining a sense of independence that is as delightful as it is illusory. Recycled as a “fellow traveler,” he reintegrates into the Party’s strategy, without the burden of explicit submission.
This is how phenomena like the epidemics of Lulism or Obamism among people who imagine themselves immune to any appeal from their leftist past can be explained. By creating Obamas and Lulas, the revolutionary left acts like a church that, through clever ecumenism, opens itself to the return of apostates for a casual visit.
Doing My Duty
O Globo, December 30, 2000
A thinker must be faithful to the truth as it presents itself at every moment in the examination of concrete issues, without being swayed by a mental atmosphere that colors his entire horizon of consciousness with a general and preconceived tint of “left,” “right,” or whatever else.
Personally, I have never expressed support for any “right-wing” policy, and it is purely psychotic induction and resentment from insecure leftists that some try to see me as a fierce right-winger. They deduce this from the criticisms I make of them. They reason based on the Schmittian idea that “whoever is not with us is on the other side,” showing that they cannot even imagine that there exists a free intelligence, capable of attacking evil without falling into the foolish automatism of assuming that simply inverting wickedness would make it good.
Logically speaking, the political position of an individual can never be inferred from the criticisms, no matter how harsh, he directs at an ideology or party, for the simple reason that identical criticisms can be made from various ideological positions. Zionism, for example, has been attacked with equal vigor by the far right and by communists. Islamic fundamentalism is equally abhorred by conservative Christians, as it is by feminist and gay leftists or modernist liberals and atheists.
Only a positive stance in favor of certain policies defines ideological identity and commitment. Criticism is free and can come from all directions.
The communist mentality, however, is so unfamiliar with freedom of thought, so heavily subjugates intelligence to party command, that it goes so far as to catalog someone’s ideology not by the intentions and values he professes, but by the simple hypothetical and almost always paranoid conjecture of the political or publicity benefit that parties or currents may gain from his words, even opportunistically and against his will. In the imagination of communists, no one states “x” or “y” with the simple intention of telling the truth but always with the premeditation of some political result, no matter how remote. This is how they think: indifferent to truth and falsehood, they only speak with political effects in mind. Therefore, they imagine that the rest of humanity is like that too.
It was based on this insanely projective reasoning that the Soviet state came to condemn political indifference as a crime, judging it to denote sinister counter-revolutionary intentions. Boris Pasternak ended up in prison because of it.
For my part, I am persuaded that a thinker must be scrupulously restrained in expressing support for any specific policy: he must simply critique what is wrong and perverse, leaving to the public and politicians — those who pride themselves on being “practical men” and who have the duty to be so — the decision on positive policies that will suppress or remedy the evil.
Moreover, if I criticize the left, it is because today only the left exists. There is no right in Brazil. There are right-wingers, but each is locked in their private convictions, without any collective action. The most obvious proof is that the word “right” only appears in the press with sinister and criminal connotations, never as the designation of a political current that has the right to exist like any other. To point to someone as a right-winger is to accuse him of being a conspirator, a coup plotter, a corrupt person, a torturer. So much so that any crime committed in self-interest by illiterate rural colonels is immediately attributed to the “right,” which is at least as absurd as seeing leftist ideological motivation in every crime committed by street kids. You can only speak in such a tone, with impunity, about a voiceless, powerless minority. The curious thing is that those same people who speak about the right in these terms without fear of reprisal, proving with this that the right has no power, want to make us believe that it exists, that it is an organized force and controls Brazil. All this is pure histrionics from a left that knows it is in power but does not want to take responsibility for its situation.
Today, the establishment is leftist, and so is the opposition. Read the Marxist-Leninist manuals of the Ministry of Education and tell me if a government that educates children in this mentality is not communist in spirit, temporarily conforming to capitalism that it cannot suppress. And what government, without strong communist inspiration, would wish for the suppression of banking secrecy? Under these conditions, it would be hypocrisy for me to speak ill of the “right” just to play the good boy and feign a stereotypical independence. Authentic independence does not fear the labels imposed on it and does not avoid them through the appeal to opportunistic speeches. It says what needs to be said, and that’s it. The confusion created around it is up to the malice and shamelessness of each one.
Why I Am Not a Liberal
Jornal do Brasil, March 8, 2007
There are many reasons to be against socialism, but among them, there are two that are in conflict with each other: you have to choose. Either you like the free market because it promotes the rule of law, or you like the rule of law because it promotes the free market. In the first case, you are a “conservative”; in the second, a "liberal."1
For a while, you don’t notice the difference. When the right is still incipient, nebulous, and shapeless, liberals and conservatives remain in a cozy promiscuity, fused in their common aversion to leftist statism. As soon as the fight against leftism demands a more precise doctrinal definition, the difference emerges: either you base the rule of law on a traditional conception of human dignity, or you reinvent it according to the market model, where the right to arbitrary preferences is only limited by a freely negotiated contract between the parties. In both cases, you want freedom, but in the first, its foundation is “material,” that is, defined by explicit values and principles; in the second, it is “formal,” that is, defined by a contractual equation whose content is open to the choice of those involved.
If you are a conservative, you believe a citizen does not have the right to hire someone to kill them (much less to kill a third party), because life is a sacred gift that cannot be negotiated. But for the liberal, nothing is more sacred than the right to buy and sell — life itself included: if you think your life is unbearable and want to hire a professional to end it, neither the State nor the Church has the right to give the slightest opinion on the matter. If what is unbearable is your anencephalic baby,2 your senile grandmother, or your schizophrenic uncle, they do not have contractual capacity, but you do: if you also have the money to pay for a lethal injection and a nurse to administer it, nothing will prevent all three nuisances from being removed from the market through the services of this professional. Curiously, I do not know a single liberal who recognizes the essential identity of hiring a nurse to administer an injection to these unfortunate individuals, a hitman to blow their brains out, or a bulldozer to flatten them. When they say they consider the first option more “humane,” they fail to realize they are appealing to a conservative argument and abominably limiting market freedom.
Conservatism is the art of expanding and strengthening the application of traditional moral and humanitarian principles through the formidable resources created by the market economy. Liberalism is the firm decision to subject everything to market criteria, including moral and humanitarian values. Conservatism is the Judeo-Christian civilization elevated to the power of the great capitalist economy consolidated in the rule of law. Liberalism is a moment in the revolutionary process that, through capitalism, ends up dissolving the heritage of Judeo-Christian civilization and the rule of law into the market.3
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Editor’s Note: The author places the words “liberal” and “conservative” in emphatic quotes not to attack these groups but to indicate that they signify “ideal types,” not assimilable to any concretely existing political group in the vicinity.↩
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Editor’s Note: Regarding the legalization of anencephalic abortion in Brazil, see “Supreme Court — Urgent,” a message from April 7, 2012, by Alberto R. S. Monteiro, explaining the measures taken to open a precedent for unrestricted legalization. Available at the link: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/avisos/20120410-aborto.html. By eight votes to two, however, the Supreme Court decided that anencephalic abortion is no longer a crime in the country.↩
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Editor’s Note: This article ended up sparking more controversies than the author expected, leading him to address them in another article: “The Ugly Duckling of National Politics,” published in the Diário do Comércio on March 19, 2007, and available at the link: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/070319dc.html.↩
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