By FLAVIO AGUIAR*
How to qualify the stupidity of our “mainstream” media, provincial, full of prejudices?
There is a very curious piece of research undertaken by two American psychologists and university professors in the 1990s on self-satisfied ignorance or incompetence. They were David Dunning and Justin Kruger, and their research led to the formulation of the so-called “Dunning-Kruger Effect”. Basically, it consists of the assertion that the more a person is ignorant or incompetent about a subject, the more difficult the self-recognition of one's own ignorance or incompetence can become.
They started from the study of a concrete case, of the robber MacArthur Wheeler, who robbed two banks on the same day. Filmed by local cameras, identified, he was detained, and he was genuinely surprised at being discovered. He had covered his face with lemon juice, believing it would make him invisible. He started from the knowledge that lemon juice serves as an invisible ink, when written on a sheet of paper, visible only after it is heated. The point is that this knowledge, which is real, has become a “knowledge”, and then a “certainty”, completely unrealistic, that if lemon juice becomes invisible on paper, it becomes invisible, let’s say. , the paper itself, or the face it covers.
The unsuccessful Wheeler even argued with a “scientific” experiment: he had taken a picture of his face covered in the juice, and the face did not appear in the photograph. After some research, the Dunning-Kruger duo came to the conclusion that, with his eyes blinded by the juice and its sting, Wheeler had been unable to focus on his own face, actually taking a picture of the ceiling above him.
The research and conclusions of the two university professors were the target of several challenges. They embarked on a thorny path, that is, seeking mathematical formulas that quantified the relationship between ignorance, or incompetence, and the inability to recognize it. They hit the donkeys in the water, or hit a wall. Mathematical formulas are precise and unchanging, while the behavior of erratic people is exactly that: erratic, imprecise and changing.
But there were interesting corollaries. One of them was developed by researcher Ben Debney, from western sydney university, in Australia. in your paper, "Adolf Hitler: a Political Archetype of the Dunning-Kruger Effect”, he shows how, in addition to the power of self-conviction (when the future Leader claims that his incapacity as a painter and architect stems from the Jewish-Marxist danger), the self-convinced manages to “demonstrate” the hypothesis to others, transforming it into a successful thesis. The DK Effect thus proves to be collectively contagious.
More: the affirmation of one's own ignorance for the collective that is reached, becomes the proof of a “superior” form of knowledge, and not only from the “scientific” point of view, but also “moral”. It is enough, as in the historical example cited, to find the appropriate convincing formulas, moved by one's own cleverness and ability to manipulate arguments and feelings – in the case of Germany in the 1930s and Brazil today – those of resentment. Bolsonaro and his gang do this with mastery, which does not cancel their stupidity and that of everyone, from Damares to Salles, from Araújo to Pazzuelo, from Ramos to his children, etc., because, if that is the opposite of intelligence, it it's not about cleverness or scoundrel.
Thus, we have a government that in two years of existence has done nothing good, only propagated the destruction of the precarious fabric of social welfare that had been built from the 1988 Constitution (in this it was preceded by the coup government and also stupid, although more greasy and greasy, by Michel Temer), in addition to destroying the international prestige of Brazilian foreign policy, built since Rio Branco, if not before, with the conservative but lucid government of Pedro II.
The problem doesn't stop there. If the Bolsonaro government is the cause of wrongdoing, it is also the effect. How to qualify the stupidity of our media mainstream, provincial, full of prejudices, manufacturing what they know to be a lie, about the invention of corruption by the Brazilian left? Or praising the complete failure of neoliberal policies around the world, such as the success of order and progress? How can we qualify the acceptance of such theses by our judicial system, which ranges from first instance judges to the Supreme Court, enduring the excesses of Lava -Jato and the coup against Dilma Rousseff? What to do with the hypocrisy of the shepherds of darkness, who use the name of Christ to banish the principles of demonic preaching with which they instill the most opaque ignorance? With the military, now enraptured by the possibility of decorating their future pajamas with a few extra salary caps? And let's put etc. on this.
In short, after these two years we are in a bad way, dealing with an out-of-control pandemic and an uncontrolled epidemic promoting ignorance, incompetence and self-satisfied stupidity.
Are there pockets of resistance? There is. What is still missing is to sew them together, instead of remaining in sterile discussions about whether the anti-fascist, anti-Bolsonaro front should be kilometric, metric, centimetric or millimetric, when we should seek to make it so universal as possible.
Let us not repeat the mistake of the Germans in the 1930s, when communists and social democrats did not speak to each other, nor did they speak to liberals, who did not speak to religious people, and everyone did not speak to aristocrats, who did not speak to the military, they didn't talk to anyone. The Nazis ate them all up, around the edges as well as the core.
* Flavio Aguiar is a journalist, writer and retired professor of Brazilian literature at USP. Author, among other books, of Chronicles of the World Upside Down (Boitempo).
