By Alexandre Aragão de Albuquerque*
The disorder that the pandemic is promoting in the world is capable of moving our freedoms towards the creation of new harmonies that are fairer and more distributive of material and spiritual goods
Human freedom is a central constituent of our existence: the ethical imperative specifies us as beings capable of making choices, of opting, of electing. And if for some reason someone abstains from expressing their vote, they are indirectly positioning themselves before others in the communicative relationship of collective life, so that an alleged neutrality is impossible. As José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), considered the greatest Spanish philosopher of the XNUMXth century, reminds us, to live is to feel fatally forced to exercise freedom, and even when desperately deciding not to decide, there is always a consequence. From which it is concluded that it is impossible not to value, not to make evaluative judgments. To value is to establish relationships. With these choices we have the possibility of improving (or not) our personality as well as the reality-world around us.
According to the Italian thinker Norberto Bobbio, the great turnaround that occurred in the Western cultural paradigm occurred through the historical phenomenon of the first Christian communities, for which all humans are brothers as children of God, according to the doctrine taught by their founder Jesus of Nazareth. . In addition to the fraternity that unites us all ontologically, for Christian anthropology, each person matters because God decrees any act addressed to the smallest of humans to be done to him. Philosophers' efforts since then have been to secularize Christian ethics. John Locke is a modern thinker who stands out in this intellectual work when he states that “to understand political power well and to derive it from its origin, one must consider that all men are naturally in a state of perfect freedom”. Concluding that every person is a moral being.
A first look at the pandemic comes from Brazil. On April 08, President Jair (without a party) made yet another statement on the national television network, due to his media visibility being declining sharply in view of the growing popularity of the Minister of Health, Henrique Mandeta, due to the fact that the fight against the pandemic requires the dissemination of technically correct and reliable information - which is not the practice of Bolsonarist social media.
The phenomenon of the pandemic made public the choices made by Bolsonaro, in addition to laying bare his inability to lead, administrative coordination, statist vision, autonomy of analysis and discernment based on balanced rational and scientific thinking in the face of the global pandemic situation so challenger. Since the beginning of the global health crisis, it has acted decisively in treating covid-19 with an eminently ideological bias, classifying it as a “simple little flu”, as did Donald Trump, to respond to the demand of his group politician, representatives of Capital and the fundamentalist religious Militia, for whom the most important thing is Money (the economy) and not the Human Person, contrary to scientific thinking that defined social isolation as a necessary step to curb the speed of virus contagion . In addition, contradictory and irresponsible, Bolsonaro has insisted uninterruptedly, like Trump, violating the public health protocol, to indicate for the treatment of this “little flu”, as if it were a vitamin C, the drug “hydroxychloroquine”, a drug that needs full clinical follow-up for its prescription due to the serious side effects it produces. Finally, he continues to demonstrate his eugenics racism, present in Nazi-fascist personalities in history, when he referred to the large risk group (more than 30 million) of people over 60 years old as if they were disposable and unimportant.
The second look comes from the choices made by the local authority of the city of Las Vegas, state of Nevada – USA. Photographs and reports traveled the world showing 500 impoverished homeless people being sent by local authorities to a huge open-air parking lot, transformed into a kind of concentration camp, in which these human people will have to be temporarily confined, spaces demarcated with white paint on the floor, on their “blue mattresses and white covers” (sic!). It so happens that in Las Vegas there are currently 150 thousand (one hundred and fifty thousand) empty hotel rooms, in a state – Nevada – which is one of the richest in the world. Why did the State of Nevada choose not to welcome these people into these empty hotels? What is the ethics behind this decision?
This fact also touched Pope Francis directly, speaking in an interview given to Austen Ivereigh, published on April 07, in the British periodical The Tablet, calling it “discard culture”. For the Pope, the throwaway culture, combined with other psychosocial phenomena in capitalist societies, is showing a serious tendency to degenerate into a culture of hate. He states that when he hears “some speech by someone responsible for order or government, he remembers Hiltler’s speeches in 1934 and 1936” (in XX World Congress of the International Association of Criminal Law, November 13 to 16, 2019).
Seeing the impoverished, in the words of Francis, means going to meet them to restore their humanity. They are not things, they are not disposable. They are people. It cannot be satisfied with a welfare policy for some, and another policy for “rescued animals”, aimed at the impoverished, because most of the time the poor are treated like animals. Teresa of Calcutta saw them and had the courage to go out to meet them to embark on a journey of conversion. And here is the strength of the charisms in the Church because they make us less attached to certain old and rigid ways of thinking, causing a “disorder” from the freedom of their creativity, after all, freedom is a gift from God. And from these disorders new harmonies are generated. Hopefully, the disorder that the pandemic is promoting in the world will be able to move our freedoms towards the creation of new harmonies that are fairer and more distributive of material and spiritual goods for all the people of our Planet.
*Alexandre Aragão de Albuquerque Master in Public Policy and Society from the State University of Ceará (UECE)
