By EUGENIO TRIVINHO

The historic irruption of the new political scum in the upper fabric of the State throws the debt of ruin into the lap of conservative elites

FOR Angela Pintor dos Reis

“What Hannah Arendt calls absolute evil, I prefer to call monstrous. O anthropos creates the sublime, but is equally capable of creating monstrosity” (Cornelius Castoriadis, The fates of totalitarianism).

The Bolsonarist tribalization of politics (that is, a certain authoritarian relationship with the power struggle on the perimeter of the State) and the dramatic pandemic escalation in the country (more precisely, a certain denialist and anti-Western relationship with this humanitarian tragedy) allowed us to know a little more of the dark fringes of the soul of the Brazilian people.

For those who practice deduction as a method, the re-emerging neo-fascist cellar at the beginning of this century has always been wide open, has always varied synonyms and shades, sometimes in forged legality, sometimes with aloof shame, from the assault on stems of Caesalpinia echinata, current Paubrasilia echinata, known brazilwood. However hidden the signs of scabrousness, this underworld never stopped pleading for the distribution of letters, from the colonial boat to Pindorama.

The most recent political and social problem is that resentful and very ignorant volcanic magmas in the incontinent rush ended up looming in the institutional crust of society; and, dazzled by the limelight lit in the spotlight, they control today – glamorous to faces – the vandal deck on the table of absurdity as normality.

It is now clear how much this rough and ungrateful lava, as intractable as it is infamous, and totally uneducated for democracy (as for civilization, despised the gangs with clubs and guns, choleric pride at the front, crude breastplate of a stove), could never having reached the highest decision-making strata of the State, especially the main executive chair of the Republic. The unhappiness of the pandemic helped to expose the viscera of this magma: an abundant set of mindless and insensitive intentions, whose gangsterism only surprises the gullible and shortsighted perception.

From distant echoes – from the Empire to the Republic –, the systemic disservice of so many conservative and reactionary political elites, through successive forms of administration that reproduce extreme inequalities, is criminally implicated in the recurrent lactation and irruption of this historical ephemeris. The future of intelligence will certainly have to frame lava in the peculiar alphabets of incivility. More than three centuries of insufficient and (almost) continuous investment in education,¹ without quality, effectiveness and result management, one day it achieves a macrostructural and unified effect with a militia finger in the air – fire sheathed, lit fuse – on the red face of cynical indifference and simulated naivety, attributes of the technocratic top mentality. This structurally disorganized or incomplete budget effort, always disproportionate to the geopolitical size of the country – far from what Fernando de Azevedo, Anísio Teixeira, Paulo Freire and Darcy Ribeiro, among others, advocated² –, when combined with high unemployment rates and population segregation, shows an explosive effect, charging a high collective price, beyond the elite strongholds: in the wake of 2016 and 2018, the denialist and disastrous administration of the pandemic, more than 300 thousand deaths later, makes Brazil atone for the opprobrium of the world.

In the insolent impetus of repeating military decades, the proud scum – interclass – and with a buffoon representative in the Planalto Palace, expands neo-fascist roots: obsessively ruminating perpetuation coup – Defense coup, Sitio coup, militarized self-coup or consorts –, launches abuses to the ongoing presidential race.

To redeem themselves from blame, the conservative political elites, who supported Bolsonarist neo-fascism and today intend to clean themselves of it, will want to sweep away the scabrousness (this deep bitterness that attacked them on the sides and now interns in the front garden) to the armored den of taboos, under rugs with a laughing pallor, in the living room.

They ask decency to forget what it sees and deduces. Unconditional, she disobeys iniquity. Its legitimate indiscipline asserts that the political, economic and moral account of the reconstruction of what a few years have already destroyed is being thrown into the lap of the nepotists and physiologists of the instituted conservatism, with projection throughout the century. Center-left social movements will never forget the paternity of this so often announced devastation. An optimistic historical estimate warns that even a tripled and systematic investment in structure and irreversible work at all educational levels, for more than five decades, will be insufficient – ​​and this keeping in mind the proportion of due suspicion: neo-fascists, supremacists and the like – of individuals to groups and companies – are rarely convinced, with authenticity and honesty, of the universal value of democracy and its beneficial effects for the development of individuals and social relations. To sabotage it, they cultivate, within the right-wing mentality, a quixotic and puerile alibi: the need for a fetishist defense against “imaginary communism”, supposedly abolishing all differences (material and symbolic). In a frayed rhetorical expedient, they first blame this chimera for the general threat to institutions (of “order” and “progress”) and, subsequently, use it to justify the closure of time itself.

Rarely does the obvious deserve explanation, as in this case: the historical shame of the liability mentioned in education will never be of the popular, vulnerable, secreted, peripheral and/or disadvantaged classes - the majority classes made “servicing” and legally obliged (regardless of voluntary inclinations circumstantial and unforeseen). No hegemonic discursive stratagem hides the leak and its sneezes. They reach, also blaming, the convenient and still unsolvable ambiguity of the Brazilian middle classes.

For the sake of rigor, in the midst of null hopes, the best example that the conservative elites would set – and, obviously, they will never do – would be not only to escape from the spotlight, but also to leave the national scene for a long time, at a silent pace, to avoid booing from the four corners. Patenting the rigor of the rigors does, at least, more than expose the nourishing bone that such elites and surroundings do not let go: it keeps the needle of what is fair in the main wound, in bond with posterity.

* Eugene Trivinho is professor of the Graduate Studies Program in Communication and Semiotics at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP).

Notes

1- The relevant exception in this respect encompasses the budgetary policy of progressive governments. The period from 2002 to 2015, in which the power alliance led by the Workers' Party (PT) administered the country, was the one that most observed investment in education in Brazil. International and comparative statistical details can be seen, for example, in the reports Education at a glance from 2017 to 2019, from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The National Institute of Educational Studies and Research Anisio Teixeira (INEP), an agency of the Ministry of Education, provides access to archives (in English and Portuguese), in http://inep.gov.br/education-at-a-glance.

2 – The opportunity, harassed by so many rude uncertainties, demands urgency: it is worth mentioning, for necessary disclosure, the respective volumes of the Coleção Educadores, conceived and financed by the Ministry of Education (when the body was a respected precinct and qualifier of the branch), in partnership with the Organization of the United Nations for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO) and the Joaquim Nabuco Foundation:

BEISIEGEL, Celso de Rui. Paulo Freire. Recife: Joaquim Nabuco Foundation; Massangana, 2010.

NUNES, Clarice. Anísio Teixeira. Recife: Joaquim Nabuco Foundation; Massangana, 2010.

GOMES, Candido Alberto. Darcy Ribeiro. Recife: Joaquim Nabuco Foundation; Massangana, 2010.

PENNA, Maria Luiza. Fernando de Azevedo. Recife: Joaquim Nabuco Foundation; Massangana, 2010.

The more than 60 volumes of the Educators Collection, including the above, are available at http://www.dominiopublico.gov.br/pesquisa/ResultadoPesquisaObraForm.do.