By LUIZ ROBERTO ALVES*
Brazil has become accustomed to the economy of violence
For Moïse, family and new immigrants, my shame
1.
Imagine the horror of environmentalist Zé do Lago, Márcia and Joane in front of the sapien-demons armed at the very moment of the firing squad. Next to it, the little turtles handled by these three people waiting for their redemption, that is, to reach the larger water and live, following their history and their nature.
What was the action of Zé do Lago (beautiful name!) and his dear women that stirred the liver of small or large power holders in Pará? Would it have been something similar to what Marielle and Chico Mendes were doing, or less and yet sufficient for the brutal shooting?
Chico and Marielle not only wanted to live, but they had everything to live for: they had clear missions, already covered in good measure and still fruitful in the near future. Now, these are the people chosen for death in the demonic whirlpool, because in this reading of the world, the fruitful must dry up in order for the lucrative dryness of privileges to prosper. Once the three deaths are understood as a symbol of so many others, we can sit and wait for the murderers and masterminds to meet. The death of Chico Mendes, 1988, as is known, was a local phenomenon, people saw the murderers all over Xapuri, waiting for the time and the turn, which came, to the disgrace of the Amazonian history and a sign of the unjust country and politically dwarfed.
However, those poor devils (missing going after certain landowners and their association) were caught with hot weapons in their hands. But if it weren't for the international fanfare, some trickery would have been done. As for Marielle and Anderson, the backlash of Rio's judicial, political and police authorities only shows the general ethical failure of this beautiful and diverse country in which we were born and live. They can deceive the poor people, because unfortunately we have them, but not those who have already studied the history of Brazil. Zé do Lago, Márcia and Joane await (on behalf of all of us) their time and their turn to guarantee justice.
This country has become accustomed to the economy of violence and the accounting of death, which has already entered the hearts of the chaste and supposedly well-intentioned. At the same time, the new “companions” of our body in the cyberculture of capitalism were neglected. Now, if everything came together, if human bodies in the Anthropocene expanded technologically and were crossed by imperceptible phenomena, the old demonic phenomenon also approached in favor of death. The demon ceases to be astronomical and becomes intimate. He humanized himself a lot.
In Brazil, crimes that cannot be revealed due to a kind of “reason of greatness” already instituted in colonial history, gain high political and institutional strength and the responsible authorities, all symbolically bankrupt, do nothing but wait for oblivion. Which usually comes systematically violated on earth. The more violated the society, the more able it is to forget, because violence does not trigger political consciousness, but daily, internal consciousness, which does not support many confrontations. This is how Lukács, Heller and Freire explain, by extension, the complicity of the losers with the winner and the consequent difficulty of exits via education and culture.
The good man, Zé, who was portrayed several times in his ecological work with the turtles, there on the banks of the Xingu, asks questions in the mouths of the remaining family: “why did they kill?” Now, if there is so much unpunished violence in this land, there is not a single phenomenon that justifies a single act by Zé do Lago for the lives of animals. Anything raised is sordid. But the hypothesis of nothing is more palatable, especially in the case of people who live in the sertão and in the forests.
This country is experiencing a general ethical bankruptcy, disproportionately expanded since the 2016 parliamentary coup, the rise of the fascists to power and the government of the unspeakable palace (which still has votes, let us remember!).
The concept of general ethical failure applies to the entire security system in the country, even if there are people committed to justice within the system. From those who must have looked at the crime scenes that killed Josés do Lago and Moïses (and did nothing) to the courts and their strange decision-making boxes. On the other hand, the action of the righteous, in its limited action, does not reach symbolic values capable of breaking ethical bankruptcy. Therefore, the best reasoning that exists for a country where many women are killed every day, many people from LGBT movements, boys and girls of African descent, workers in the fields, forests and rivers is that it has already happened, by way of extraction of organization and functioning of society, general ethical bankruptcy.
Changing this state will require a lot of honesty, a lot of disclosure of covered cases, an end to the bigotry that inverts semantic fields and produces blatant lies in police and judicial games; in short, a revolution that involves postures, work techniques, deep compassion, the implosion of the ways in which the word and the world are read in this “relaxed and relaxed” land, as Anchieta wrote a while ago.
This is the central theme of a change via election, but it will probably not be the subject of the rallies because ethics is always (badly) associated with moralism and ends up always more “electoral” promising to kill the hunger of the impoverished, offering more wages, reorganizing productive systems and investing in social infrastructure, that is, subjects from the old economese of the 1960s. That is, subjects falsely considered “economic”, but in fact they are not, since the central motivations that induce such actions are cultural-educational, or human rights.
Guimarães Rosa was and is right. The book dedicated to Ara, Araci, the “angel of Hamburg” provides in the dedication the first clues about the existence of evil in the world; in this case, the Nazi, today with new roots.
The devil (is) in the street, in the middle of the whirlpool. It is what you read. But the devil, always cool, doesn't ride alone. In the forms of his falsehood, the ciranda of “the one who laughs”, the debauched, the scornful, produces an inclusive circle of sapiens, which is easily justified by its fall, weakness, incompleteness. Strictly speaking, inclusion in the whirlpool is special for sapiens, as it would not be possible to take hummingbirds, deer, and cats into the whirlpool, despite the horror movies that maliciously include the latter.
Furthermore, any redemptive act of repentance by the Homo sapiens, via donations, screams and punches in the chest, can be done later and when older, perhaps in one of the churches on the nearest block. Repentance also implies planning in the society of coach spiritual, spectacular financial aids, exposition and simulation. Whirlpools are often transferred to the interior of certain churches.
There is, therefore, enormous parallelism and sometimes convergences between work relations, the exploitation of those who depend on the powerful, the devaluation of people's lives, as well as political-electoral practices and the relationship between the "young man" or "the capiroto ” and sapiens, abundantly illustrated by world literature and specifically sacred literature. And not just Judeo-Christian. In the vortex of demo-sapiens, the easy and lucrative assumption of general ethical bankruptcy is easier. So we followed this wide road. In spite of so many churches and so many believers, the road followed by the supposed pastors and their crowds is the anti-evangelical one, as biblical literature only admits walking through the narrow and difficult door. In the narrow gate there is no room for whirlwinds.
2.
It's time above all
to stop being just
the lonely vanguard
from ourselves.
It's about meeting.
(It lasts in the chest, the limpid burns
truth of our mistakes)
It's about opening the way.
Those who will come will be people,
and knowing will be, fighting.
(Thiago de Mello, for those who will come)
Facing the wounded truth
by the guardians of injustice,
to the mockery of opulence
and the golden might
whose splendor feeds
from the hunger of the humiliated,
it's best to get used to it,
the world has always been like this.
However, I'm not used to it.
(Thiago de Mello, I don't learn the lesson)
Two stanzas by Thiago de Mello. They create connections with text 1, not because of the probable “contents” of pain, injustice and non-conformity, but because of the accent, the tone and the game of postures that the poetic self builds to locate itself in the world. It is about intuiting that many of Thiago's poems walk close to these stanzas, among them the Song for the phonemes of joy, elaborated by the poet's coexistence with the educational practice of Paulo Freire and Os statutes of man, elaboration as free as it strongly signals human rights.
Thiago's poems, as is common in the field of poetics, more é than diz, because the great feelings of the human-poet work with obsessions directed towards the future, capable of relating what has already been accomplished with something that does not signal present changes, although fundamental, because the poet also elaborated meanings for the future when it was past, when it was young, when he learned to place himself in the world. Your annoyances come from afar”. In this way, poetry distances itself from the judicial regime, which judges the past and makes it present in the updating of penalties and acquittals embodied in the judgments.
But it also distances itself from politics, which tries to live an eternal present and does not notice its old age, or even its obsolescence or obsolescence, when the human condition is bewildered and society moves away from traditional representation. Poetry is the full representation of the human in the world, as the sound organization is the sensitivity of the way of being in the world. Thiago, for example, was always bothered, as it reads: "... whose splendor (of power) feeds on the hunger of the humiliated". It is not a political and localized phrase, but a cosmic one, which speaks to the ears and hearts of all life and signals an equally cosmic nonconformity. However, those who place themselves as attentive and affectionate listeners, sensitive to people's lives, can bring about changes in their being. That is why, all over the world, rural and urban people, working people, have always quoted poets. Indeed, they learned the meaning of poetry.
Exiled, Thiago and Paulo Freire understood well the poetic meaning of the country (which could be) redeemed by readings of word and world. The apprehended/learned words ask the world not to empty themselves as quickly as the time of learning. In fact, the world is already realized in its spelling, because whether brick, flood, little house or black boy, the world is given in the senses evoked and lived in the daily life of the poor, of the millions. There one understands both the situation of exiles and migrants and their creation and the human scope of creation.
Hence the pedagogy of the oppressed and the poem Song for the phonemes of joy. Perhaps the dictators had an objective reason to exile Thiago and Freire (like others and others), just as the murderers and bosses of Zé do Lago, Chico Mendes and Marielle had their reasons, that is, they constructed their own reasons, to the defiance of all the Brazilian framework of justice in bankruptcy. But between these reasons and the REASON there must be an abysmal distance, which does not occur in this beautiful and ugly country.
There is a widespread lie in the country, which is the existence of perfect, complicated, intricate crimes, without clues. The intelligence and wages put at the service of people's safety would have the ethical obligation to unravel, clarify and punish all the evildoers of these whirlpools, be it Marielle, Zé do Lago and the black boys, the greatest symbol of all the other wronged ones. Outside of that, it's a lie and pretense. The failure of the security and justice system.
3.
Another failure, the economês deteriorated in Anthropocene times.
A word about the supposed, or assumed, general economic plans of some candidates, put to light and signed by people close to the 2022 candidates in the pages of the Folha de São Paulo of the beginning of the year. It matters little whether they are trial balloons; they are organized texts and must say something. Pastore, Mantega, Marconi and Meirelles wrote.
Given that the agenda was economics and the four texts were obedient to it, four assertions must be made in this time of surveillance capitalism (Zubof) of other people's data mining (various authors), exponential technologies and new governments (kivernu, da cybernetics).
(1) The four authors of the texts excel in Econonese, which would not be a problem if economic knowledge had the right to be dominant, as it was in the developmentalist experience, especially during the military dictatorship. Strange that the four authors work as if they were in 1956 or 1979, or even in redemocratization. They demonstrate a unanimous inability to deal with issues that are already beginning to be seen in another key (as Oscar Niemeyer would say, “in search of the unexpected”). Capitalist liberalism, supposed to be necessary and indispensable, as if it were our everyday clothes, is in fact an uncomfortable prosthesis that does not know how to do anything more than financially circulate and manufacture misery, especially in countries that are always vulnerable, such as Brazil. The economese of these authors has already become a myth for a long time and it seems that they did not realize it,
(2) Capitalism as it is and should be, today, nail and flesh of world corporations of consumer technologies and surveillance (big tech) that arm the cybernetic government all over the world, has little to do with public policy, which is what interests governments and governance. The association between the economy and the economic system is out of place, because the economy that interests real society, driven by concrete social interactions, is the one that is revalued within education, the transport system, housing, ecological-environmental actions , health, etc. The capitalism of world governments that have not been voted on at any ballot box does not interest and is incompatible with all our needs. Why do these four gentlemen submit to them and not seek another language, perhaps something that works with values and processes but which will not be given the name of economy. Will the male and female candidates still make speeches as if they were in 1956?
(3) The entire scientific system moves through new interactive processes, which are born from interdisciplinarity and can reach transdisciplinarity, when many types of knowledge are associated with great themes of high transversality. It is not just that one researcher or public agent is next to another to think about a common subject. It so happens that all the ways of knowing the world and life (because the world is in our hands and our hands are moved by the world) are changing vertiginously and, therefore, we will have to work in governments with brand new attitudes of conception, organization, realization and evaluation. It is impossible to repeat previous modes. Capitalism itself, as thought and lived in a few centuries, does not see its way and that is why it is clinging to the government where money moves brutally, which is not our world, since it can only provide death and endless and unnecessary accumulation. Liberal capitalism as we know it no longer has a place on a planet in mutation and upheaval. It turned out to be disproportionate and does not fit in another language (green, social, ecological, human rights). This regime does not suit us. Mutant humanity must abandon liberal capitalism and all other capitalisms that present themselves. It is useless clothing for new bodies in new time-space. Imagining a dominant knowledge controlling and subordinating other knowledge and social projects is more reminiscent of 1960 than 2022. So, what to do with texts centered on old economic operations, as is the case with these four?
(4) There is a lack of ethical, aesthetic and way of knowing thinking, the path that Paulo Freire affectionately called epistemology, as he wanted many more people to use this word and not just those initiated into the game of thinking. It happens that we will have to direct and guide governments by passing on ethics, aesthetics, knowledge, sharing, education, planning, etc. to the razor's edge, in order to demonstrate the end of obsolete and frankly outdated ways of doing politics and the advent of what really allows us to make societies less ugly, if possible beautiful, capable of inspiring confidence in youth, radically redeeming the chastened biosphere, overcome racisms and many other isms that only diminish us as sapiens.
The language of the four “economics” texts resembles papyri, and even then papyri copied from somewhere else. They seem very distant from the now that we study and live. Well, that's not how we're going. But we need to go in another direction.
* Luiz Roberto Alves is a senior professor at the School of Communications and Arts at USP.