By LUIZ MARQUES*
The repressive safeguard functions of the status quo they cannot stop the wheel of history, in the direction of redemptive equality between all, all and all
João Cezar de Castro Rocha, in an interview with the newspaper State of Minas, denounces the brainwashing process fueled by engagement around misinformation and conspiracy theories. According to the author of Culture war and rhetoric of hate (Caminhos), Brazil has become an application for the “methodical creation of a parallel reality”. To achieve the sinister goal, politics is depoliticized and the public sphere hijacked by the empowerment of social media.
João Cezar de Castro Rocha makes use of the reflections of the North American social psychologist Leon Festinger who, in 1957, published A theory of cognitive dissonance. It is the search that individuals undertake to collect information that confirms decisions made and conforms their choices to their cognitions (knowledge, opinions, beliefs). The ideological conjuncture that surrounded the research was marked by the global polarization between the US and the former USSR. Radical sympathizers picked at the arguments to corner and eliminate the other. Sectarianism was the pendulum common to the positions.
Cognitive dissonance theory was developed at the height of the Cold War. At the time, robotics entered the factory production line, instilling fear in the social imagination with the tyranny of machines and the replacement of human jobs by robots. In cinema and literature, the anguish generated was expressed in the language of science fiction. Interpreters of May 1968, in France, which rejoiced in the paradise of full employment, attribute the outbreak of libertarian mobilizations to the youth's fear of the uncertainties of the future, given the rapid technological innovations.
The movement spread across different geographies and cultures, until it landed in the Americas. The earthquake imposed a defeat on the US invasion of Vietnam. Herbert Marcuse then drew attention to the peculiar capacity revealed by capitalism to absorb protests and turn them into commodities. Military jackets of unlikely dead soldiers, with numerous bullet holes and bloodstains, were offered for sale in boutiques almost online. This veteran, when he was young, bought and wore one in Porto Alegre. He had the alluring symbol hippie of peace and love.
At present, the anguish that stokes neoconservatism and waters the mill of neofascism and neoliberalism does not evoke the specter of modern technology, but morality and good customs. In cinema, horror films about zombies dangerous for normal people (?) multiply dollar signs at the box office. In literature, self-help works fill the shelves of bookstores with promises of narcissistic and hyper-individualist compensation for the precariousness of services provided by the minimal State and the erosion of institutions that gave individuals an identity – families, universities, unions and political parties . On the way back to the jungle, everyone takes care of themselves.
Resentments serve as fuel for the conservative veto: (i) the maxim “my body, my rules”, seen as the password for the authorization of abortion; (ii) the multiethnic conquest that challenges monoethnic white supremacy and; (iii) the public affirmation of pride of LGBTQIA+ groups, with the pretext that homoaffective practices confront heteronormativity standards.
The reconfiguration of gender relations, with the sexual freedom of women equaled to the condition of men, still collides with femicide. Blackness, when fighting vile prejudice and structural racism, stumbles upon rudeness and dies in the trunk of the Federal Highway Police (PRF). Gays are persecuted and killed. However, the repressive functions of safeguarding the status quo they cannot stop the wheel of history, in the direction of redemptive equality between all, all and all.
Counterpowers cry out for justice, like Ulysses, immune to the “siren song” to absorb their potential to refuse what is there. Feminism, anti-racism and anti-homophobia, in the showcase of Shopping or on the fair stall, do not lose their revolutionary edge. Iconic photos of Simone de Beauvoir, Mandela and Freddie Mercury on the bag are preferable to advertising for Coca-Cola consumption. One outdoor to publicize art to the population than one to promote guns or cars. There are goods and goods. It is important to break the shackles to overcome the pillars of the capitalist system: patriarchy (sexism) and colonialism (racism). Matter of conscience.
The Brazilian extreme right shares the transnational strategies of Donald Trump (United States), Viktor Orbán (Hungary) and Andrzej Duda (Poland) to implement a totalitarian society based on religious fundamentalism. Leaders from the lineage of Silas Malafaia (Assembleia de Deus Vitória em Cristo) and Edir Macedo (Universal Church of the Kingdom of God / RecordTV) wove the plot. Thank the gods, Jair Bolsonaro's re-election went down the drain. Here, it is worth highlighting the progressive evangelicals who, before voting for Lula da Silva, waged a tireless struggle in temples where leftist voters were condemned to burn in hell.
Guided Web Militonts
The day after the election showed the so-called “bubbles”, which would better be called “parallel dimension”. The asylum on the roads and in front of the barracks gave examples of the madness that converted lies, into dogmas, in the parade nonsense. The centralization of responses to democracy suggests an invisible and rigid hierarchy. Horizontality is illusory. There is a command as secret as the parliamentary budget, which issues instructions. Those who suspend individual rights to come and go on highways do not appear on them. They don't even salute the barracks, wrapped in the civic flag. Perhaps, they do not even live within national borders, despite the power over yellow-green bodies and gestures to extend one's arm in greeting, in the style of Leader. The display of strength and power spans time and space. The Orwellian Big Brother, today, is a telematic being.
In a coordinated way, the guidelines issued expand the uncritical perception of the “militants”, convinced of participating in the crusade of good against evil. Gross errors are disguised as virtues. Alienation prohibits rationality and abjures weighting. “A man of conviction is resistant to change. Disagree with him, and he will walk away. He'll show you facts and statistics, and he'll question the sources. Rely on logic, and he won't understand your perspective," says Leon Festinger (on. cit.). A Bible records the type in Proverbs, not by chance number 22: “How long will you fools love folly, and fools hate knowledge?” However, there are times when guided web demonstrators become disoriented, and the illusion gives way to depression and helplessness in the absence of the tutor's firm hand.
These moments occur when the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) orders the blocking of groups disseminating false information and assertive scammers, in the digital fields. could provide the mea culpa by intolerance and ignorance. Nothing. Subjectively, the cleaning in the brain prevents access to the reasoning that confronts convictions in bewildered minds. Legislation and courts have the task of severing the indicated links of domination and subordination, as well as exposing and arresting the stray patronage that finances spurious acts of civil disobedience to the Constitution.
The delusions refer to the paradigmatic guru, Olavo de Carvalho. Hence the neologism “Bolsolavism”. On Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Kuwait, public and private WhatsApp articulations, radio and television stations, cognitive chaos aligned the symptoms of denialism. As in the poet's verse, "what you have, you don't have". In the Bolsolavista narrative perspective, inspection of veracity is an unconstitutional censorship (sic) of freedom of expression, whose original concept was tortured to fit the anti-systemic post-truth framework. The sewer is having a party.
For the director of the Internet and Social Network Studies Laboratory (NetLab), Rose Marie Santini, “disinformation campaigns used computational communication techniques and multiplatform orchestration” this year. The strategies were agile, sophisticated. the factory fake news of the “hate office”, installed in the Planalto Palace by the outgoing misgovernment, resembles a kindergarten compared to the heavy artillery used throughout the electoral dispute, with crimes under the sole responsibility of armed extremism. Whether in the banditry scene in which the aspiring martyr of the scoundrel, Roberto Jefferson, throws grenades and more than fifty rifle shots at agents who are serving a court order. Be it the scene in captain-do-mato in which a low-grade actress, Carla Zambelli, runs with a pistol in her hand after a black journalist.
Confident in the domain of prestige (the art of deception) to control the herd, ordinary deputy 02 insists that the genocidal father not accept, inert, the result found in the exposure of popular sovereignty. It proposes a meeting of the virulent clan with Steve Bannon, former White House strategist in the Donald Trump administration, to format the hallucinatory speech and actions of resistance to the inauguration of the president-elect, on January 1, 2023. Reason enough to have the elective diploma revoked by the Federal Supreme Court (STF), for inciting the subversion of the Democratic Rule of Law.
The collective cognitive dissonance, increased in the midisphere by paranoid content, stimulates the destructive irrationalism of the proto-fascist worldview. In the bestialogical wave, some unspeakables surfed the board for the Senate: Damares Alves in the Federal District, Marcos Pontes in São Paulo and Hamilton Mourão in Rio Grande do Sul. The important thing now is to decode the victory of Lula / Alckmin and Frente Esperança Brasil over the laissez-faire and totalitarianism. It is urgent to deprivatize the state apparatus. In the memory of public policies of institutional protection and in the desire to participate lies the lesson of the Brazilian people for an egalitarian sociability in the world. Whoever said that “the scammers make fools of themselves” is correct. Jesters of the Court that ended.
* 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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