By EUGENIO BUCCI*
Ideology is a glue that, by making the word stick to its meaning, orders everything that people imagine they know, while hiding from them everything they do not know that they do not know.
As it becomes more evident – as if it were possible for it to become even more evident, and as if it were necessary – that the person who occupied the Presidency of the Republic until 2022 was plotting, planning and trying to execute a coup d'état, a question arises from the shadows of convenience: how can we explain the support he garnered?
Why did so many rich people flatter him so clingily? Why did so many experienced politicians bow so solicitously? Why did so many segments of the barracks behave like such illiterate gangs? And finally, why did the dispossessed masses applaud him when he climbed into trucks to vomit darkness onto the asphalt? How can we understand that they voted for a figure who was openly determined to degrade their lives a little further?
As for the wealthy, atavistic reasons may give us a clue: they identified the (forest) captain as a henchman ready to decimate any movement that demanded justice. It was like that during slavery, and it is like that now. As for the experienced politicians, their subservience can be attributed to parasitic opportunism: never have so many earned so much for so little. As for the conduct of the military men who embarked on Cebolinha's military coup, this will be deciphered by their professional disqualification, including the emptying of the word honor.
And what about the people? Why did they let themselves be fooled like this? And why do they still let themselves be fooled?
A good thread can be found in the research that Brazilian anthropologist Rosana Pinheiro-Machado led at the Laboratory of Digital Economy and Extreme Politics (DeepLab), University College Dublin (UCD), in Ireland, with funding from the European Union. Between February and November of this year, she and her team investigated how Instagram and social media have reconfigured everything we call the “world of work” in Brazil.
The study detects the “job insecurity” that affects the most vulnerable workers, warns of the need to regulate platforms that profit from disrupting labor relations, and suggests, with unshakable logic, public policy guidelines to combat the chaos. Its most subtle insights, however, have nothing to do with the exploitation of labor, but with the transformation of attitudes, beliefs, and values of the masses. By researching the most exhausting workdays, Rosana Pinheiro-Machado provides us with a map of ideology and helps us understand why the exploited masses act as they do.
“The Instagram business world presents a fundamental contradiction: it promotes a libertarian free-market ideology while displaying a pyramid structure,” the research report says. “A widely held message, from giants to nano users, is that anyone can grow, be free, be rich, and work anytime, anywhere. Yet this seemingly equal and free world is in reality a pyramid, with influencers at the top and millions of people [at the bottom] aspiring to grow.”
The study reveals the “widespread belief in a distorted form of meritocracy” with “unrealistic aspirations,” which, “from a political point of view, fosters anti-democratic sentiments, anti-rights sentiments, and the emergence of populist politicians.” In short, in the platform environment, the pizza delivery man looks at Elon Musk, sees an equal, and volunteers to imitate him. He believes he will be Elon Musk and is proud of his conviction. He is certain that all he has to do is put on the businessman’s costume, as advocated by coaches, and work without rest.
He, who is at the base of the pyramid, or even underground, sees labor rights as degrading handouts. No, he doesn't want handouts – he wants to have the license to believe that he is as bourgeois as the banker and that in a short time he will be a billionaire too.
The concept of ideology is out of fashion – which is also ideological. Some Marxists, to the letter (more to the letter than to the letter), still believe that ideology is a “false consciousness” – that the only ones who have “true consciousness” are themselves, the Marxists, to the letter. Others, followers of the French philosopher Louis Althusser, maintain that “ideology is a ‘representation’ of the imaginary relationship of individuals with their real conditions of existence”. This formulation seems better, but it does not help.
In less bombastic terms, we can say that ideology is a glue that, by making the word stick to its meaning, organizes everything that people imagine they know, while hiding from them everything they don't know they don't know. By smearing themselves with this glue, servants dress up as masters and smile at the Selfie.
Rosana Pinheiro-Machado reveals fragments of this system of beliefs and social practices, in which identity dissolves in the strong and rich leader, and explains to us, in part, why tens of millions voted for the coup plotters. In this case, incompetent coup plotters. It's funny. Sometimes those at the top are similar to those at the bottom: due to lack of preparation or cowardice, their ambitions also fail.
* Eugene Bucci He is a professor at the School of Communications and Arts at USP. Author, among other books, of Uncertainty, an essay: how we think about the idea that disorients us (and orients the digital world) (authentic). [https://amzn.to/3SytDKl]
Originally published in the newspaper The State of S. Paul.
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