By LUIZ MARQUES*
The apostles of social hierarchies and political apathy brand as irrational what is in their colonized heads
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) is a British writer who produces fascinating juvenile novels and also thought-provoking essays, such as The praise of leisure. “What is called leisure, which does not consist of doing nothing, but of doing too much of something that is not recognized in the dogmatic descriptions of the ruling classes, has as much right to show its importance as work itself.” It applies to those romantics who “refuse to enter the race for money.” Therefore, “it implies at the same time an offense and a discouragement to those who do enter.” “Americanism” (the expression was already used) stigmatizes those who dare to reject social conventions and submission to surplus value.
History is full of Bukowskians who hit the road aimlessly and bequeath dreams, without self-help platitudes. Motivational primers on self-made man compensate for an absent State and God. The status quo leaves the common people at the mercy of the slot machine opportunism in newspapers, radio and television programs, neo-Pentecostal temples and interventions of influencers on social networks. Peripheral prophets write more honest and combative messages on the walls, without the intention of profiting.
During the civil-military dictatorship, on the federal university campus, then in the historic center of Porto Alegre, rebellious young people would gather at a road junction called the “cursed corner.” The place served as a breather in the rarefied air, given the censorship and repression of state security agencies. The idleness of the misfits set a bad example by pushing the aspirations of a prestigious job, “of the people in the dining room,” to the back of the line. In exchange, the political and ideological support of the youth for the project of creative, pluralist, libertarian sociability grew.
Globalization crisis
Byung-Chul Han, in tiredness society, states that each era has its illnesses. The 20th century was an “immunological” era with a clear division between inside and outside, friend and enemy. The bacteriological model kills what seems strange, even though it does not represent a danger and has no hostile purpose. The purifying action involves attack and defense, in the dialectic of cat and mouse.
The 21st century brings the “neuronal” form: depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, borderline personality disorder, burnout syndrome. Fatigue is the body’s response to excess positivity (performance). The far right, on the other hand, is a response to the occupation of the social organism by modernism, feminism, anti-racism, LGBTQIA+ groups and progressive parties. The South Korean philosopher knows that, if globalization activates a process for transnational exchange, polarization does not end with the end of the Cold War; it diversifies its symptoms. “It passes and returns / with each sip / a revolt”, says the philosopher. haiku by Paulo Leminski.
Xenophobic nationalism is in contrast to the New World Order announced with great fanfare in the 1980s. In Europe, nationalist zeal undermines the consolidation of a continental union. In the United States, nationalist zeal is embodied in the slogan America first the restriction of commercial or warlike globalism. In Brazil, the nationalist bloc parades its virality in the anti-country carnival. In the Northern and Southern hemispheres, authoritarianism threatens democracy, formal jobs and increases inequities and injustices. Capitalism does not haunt social relations; it cannibalizes them. Nevertheless, the weariness that comes from forgotten promises evokes changes on the horizon. Those who fight are not dead.
Walking barefoot
The fatigue that rejects the logic of productive labor is, at the same time, an invitation to playfulness, where things lose their decisiveness and urgency. Boredom awakens “the desire to walk barefoot on the sand,” as octogenarian Jorge Luis Borges said when commenting on what he regretted not having enjoyed more in his long life. Belonging, kinship, everything fades away in the fatigue that recalls the (Sabah which means “to stop”. In particular, the lapse refers to artistic and cultural activities that do not seek bureaucratic goals, but rather take advantage of systemic gaps to remake habits in a journey of desire and use value – without the market algorithms of Big Tech.
“God exists even when he does not exist; but the devil does not need to exist in order to exist”, decrees Riobaldo, in Great wilderness: Veredas. Fatigue is the opportunity to overcome productivity, cheer at the stadium, applaud the musician in the park, celebrate green spaces, walk hand in hand, admire the sunset, hug comrades, imagine the star in the sky, overcome the demonic routine.
Individuals need social energy and political organization to fight class, gender and race. great capitalism that strips away human dignity, replaces it with market figures and turns everyday life into a prosaic convenience store. The growing positivity welcomes technological innovations, outsourcing and unemployability. The sharing economy turns everyone into a salesperson, on the lookout for customers. It does not lead to political resilience; it destroys the human condition in the gear that consumes consumers in the relentless dynamics of accumulation and objectification.
Teachers' fault
Michel Maffesoli, in Apocalypse: Public Opinion and Published Opinion, understands that a cycle is underway. A “revolution”, in the etymological sense of revolvere😮 eternal return in a circle. The French sociologist accuses critical thinking of “trying to stop the inescapable circulation of elites” by calling for alternatives to the senseless march of humanity. He therefore incriminates the scholars by the “latent civil war in our time”. Neofascism diagnoses the solution in the fight against the “non-partisan school”, the “gender ideology” and the “cultural war”. In the circus of horrors, idleness and fatigue give way to obscurantism, misogyny and the extermination of liberating truth.
The Maffesolian apocalypse aims to “unmask nostalgia for paradise lost and melancholy for paradise to come,” so that “we can discover what is self-sufficient in the world.” But what the theorist of “urban tribes” manages to do is to blur the class struggle in order to extol the feeling of belonging, in bubbles. The climate catastrophe shows how far foolish self-sufficiency can go.
“To consider the world filthy, infamous, to deny it, this is the root of modern resentment. Jansenism, Marxism, Freudianism, these are the teats from which the common sense of contemporary elites (read: leftists) suckles.” Postmodern invectives are directed at those who oppose the status quo who act “in function of the world and society that is always to come”. As if democratic regulations did not help in achieving the right to have rights. Without utopia, realism weakens hope in the new morning.
Our priorities
The apostles of social hierarchies and political apathy brand as irrational what is in their colonized minds. They believe that irrationality resides in collective protests against mechanisms of oppression and alienation. With the inertia of domination, they exorcise exotic elements for capital and blur the subversive, utopian and promising vectors of idleness yesterday and fatigue today.
Parasitic rentierism seeks out the mediocre to play the role of sociopathic clowns. It finds and loses in the United States and Brazil. It finds and keeps in Argentina. The only thing the global plutocracy did not count on was the 3.0 leadership of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. With the spearhead of the BRICS, multipolarity is leading the transition that prevents civilizational setbacks and dirty imperialist tricks.
If the “idleness” of Robert Louis Stevenson’s dialectical negation is equivalent to Byung-Chul Han’s disruptive “weariness,” the “civil war” alluded to by Michel Maffesoli is the reaction to the revolutionary agenda. The leading intellectual of postmodernity abuses metaphors to disqualify projects with transformative biases, capable of stopping feminicide, racism, homophobia and exploitation.
It is wrong to periodize new historical stages before realizing the ideals of modernity. Our priorities are still the tasks of freedom, equality and fraternity. The hasty eat raw.
* Luiz Marques is a professor of political science at UFRGS. He was Rio Grande do Sul's state secretary of culture in the Olívio Dutra government.
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