By LUIZ ROBERTO ALVES*

Destruction builds specificities that maintain hatred and dispenses with the rationality of arguments.

Two years have passed since a government was sensitive to changes in salary, tax and financial bases, that faced the global capitalist movement without humiliating the market god, that induced policies to lift millions of women, men and children out of poverty, that thought about the young people who study, that expanded the SUS, a great national pact that saw the establishment of rights to identities, free scientific research, the regular exercise of the law and even harsh criticism in the face of the banal amnesty that normalized the horrors of the civil-military dictatorship.

Despite these actions and policies, which are advances and constitute a government work program, the hatred, or rather, the hateful process of “construction” of contemporary Brazil continues unabated and is clearly reflected in opinion polls, parliamentary outbursts and modern social networks. No matter what new and good things are established or accomplished in the country, the national hateful process has transformed into a parallel process of social communication. No, it is not an anti-process, as fellow communication experts and responsible communicators might think.

In fact, it is a process in itself, an entire process, because when it is not similar to the communication process that established the advances mentioned in the first paragraph of this text, it is superior to it, whether in electoral moments or in the triggering of specific actions that refer to what was hatched during the 2022 electoral campaign and, strictly speaking, during the terms of Temer and Bolsonaro. Hatred is carried out as a political machine.

 However, getting used to such a phenomenon will be worse. Understanding it, without hatred of course, is essential.

The theories and practices of communication in the last decades of the 20th century have shown that social mediation (which affects memory, education, identities, customs, work practices, romantic relationships, family and community organization) is not carried out by the media, the market or public agents, even though they are powerful and interested in being the mediators themselves. For an initially linguistic reason, it is the cultures of the people that mediate social relations, this vital learning, a cultivated set of values ​​and symbols of life that is thought about and reflected upon when reacting to any information received.

Central to this understanding of cultural mediation in societies is that the person to whom a message is addressed does not, in principle, have an obligation to decode the message according to the meanings and senses developed by the sender. By respecting linguistic diversity, cultural mediation and communicative plurality, the person and his/her society are enabled to advance dialogues; as a result, cultures in contact and confrontation expand. This process is the opposite of what is happening in Brazil today, where aversions, misanthropy, end-of-conversation, shouts of “shut up”, in short, hatred are carried out as a process that emphasizes the parallelism of power.

Clear examples of this attitude can be found in the speeches of deputies such as Abílio Brunini and Nikolas Ferreira, in which no meaning is given to openings and, on the contrary, the ridiculous fabric of arguments produces systematic opposition to the announcement of the imminent seizure of power by their organization. The speeches of Brunini and Ferreira include the shouts of the PM kicking a defenseless poor person, a recent case: “I'm going to kill everyone”. It is high time to go beyond the idle talk of public agents in the sense that such a phenomenon is an isolated fact.

The idea of ​​people in these squalid parliamentary speeches necessarily lacks a face, personality, and diversity. They are ghost voters, tools of hate. On the contrary, what can be inferred from the study and scientific work is that cultural diversity in the information and communication process is distinguished as a value and desires of value, therefore capable of establishing public debate.

Politics (with this P) is established in this movement. However, this social value is what has been fiercely hindered in recent times by the Brazilian parliament, by networks, by military speeches and practices, by the convoluted and generally irresponsible world of influencers and by the conjunctural associations created to foment hate. Even experts in the production of hate (who call them “hate bait”) proliferate in the country’s social relations from the perspective of the many who profit from hate. All these people deserve José Paulo Paes’ combat poem, Epitaph of a Banker:

business

          ego

                   idleness

                    cio

(Anatomies, 1967)

 The poem expands, in this historical time, the meaning of banker, which extends to many benches and benches. It is even possible to expand the semantics of business hatred between athletes, students and various professionals. I have heard athletes say: “To compete you need a little hate”. An inversion of the concept of sport.

To expand this process, it is advisable in Brazil to mitigate and stifle citizen actions in the face of the business of hate. And the search for understanding it leads the analyst to phenomena that are seen and have existed beyond the common political fabric, that is, to a symbolism that could be called the loss of language. The country witnessed the tremendous difficulty of the former president captain in organizing his oral language.

In Bolsonaro's speech, we can see and hear a significant loss of language, but he works with the loss (because that is his linguistic limit) and establishes this loss as a standard for shouting, as a voluminous, albeit disconnected, jet that makes hatred appear as a slogan. He is not alone, because a political anti-culture is organized here, whose communication process moves between shouts and silences, creating, at the limit, commonplaces that are easily memorized.

The former president is clearly almost illiterate in writing, as this is a more demanding task than he is willing to undertake, or is impossible for him to perform. Those who follow him, despite the tradition of chatting, chatting and conversing in Brazilian culture, also get used to the loss of language and the excessive compensatory action. It is therefore important to do, to explode, to overthrow, verbs that connect to the practices of the army officer Jair Bolsonaro at another well-known moment in his life.

In the same way, what mattered was to blow up a truck, perhaps at the busy airport in Brasília. There is no language in the person who makes a bomb his pillow in front of the Supreme Court, whose sad memory advances in the conceptual creation of hatred for loss. This form of hatred, politicized from concepts of family, God, freedom, country, reveals other losses: the minimal syntactical elaboration – in fact poor and clumsy – that the captain and many people in his group execute.

Even on January 8, 2023, it was possible to hear a lot of murmuring, but little linguistic articulation among the thousands of people who were in Brasília to destroy (and not to speak), which meant the creation of irreversible facts, a clear action in favor of the dialectical construction possible under a strong loss of language. One of the greatest symbols of that day was the person's quick and decisive look at the old clock in Planalto: that was worth nothing, just as the place where he was standing was worth nothing. What mattered was the gesture, the explicit action, the overthrow. The current defendant, Antonio Cláudio, decided to stop the time of the Republic and, therefore, provoke a continuous and silent time in favor of hatred made political.

Destruction creates specificities that maintain hatred and dispenses with rational arguments. The acts of governance listed at the beginning of this text would allow, under normal conditions of political history, at least 120 million Brazilians to demonstrate their joy with the advances, since each advance in public policy provides other values ​​and achievements for each person who shares the social universe of democracy.

This is how commitments are created with new and bolder achievements. Obviously, this is not what happens when surveys seek to infer people's opinions and political reading, because programmatic hatred is triggered and punctuates every gesture, which also resonates on social networks and platforms. There, the language of contact is minimalist, poorly articulated in its syntax, but fierce, jets of hatred, gushes or flows of language losses as organizational gain.

Shouting and its avatar, violent action, lead to fatigue, order situations, encourage silence and make democratic achievements unfeasible. And this, taken together, is the central challenge for democratic government and, at the same time, incapable of treating information/communication as anything other than an instrument or tool. Shouting and explosive gestures, in a context of loss and lack of language, are pure instrumentation.

In the world created from the coup d'état of the middle of the last decade until 2022, everything and everyone is instrumentalized. On the contrary, the power of elaborate and productive language, which initiates the process of communication, is a reference value for the process of social participation and for the achievements of democracy.

 For those who seek to weave relationships between facts and social meanings in time and space, it is quite easy to see hate as a communication process, as it is present in the forkful of rice and beans, in the negotiations of Faria Lima, its spokespeople and associates, in the buying and selling of anything, in the relationships between different and unequal people, in the snitching on hotlines, including in classrooms, in the refusal (and impossibility) of organic and open discourses.

But the biggest risk is that parallel communication projects in the country create associations of meanings, exchange ideas and become somewhat similar in the exercise of language. Indistinction is a mark of horror.

It follows, therefore, that a communication process in the face of the desired and necessary Democracy can only be built under rational linguistic articulation; continuously, people, groups and organizations advance towards the expansion of objective and subjective rights. Democracy lacks a lot of feeling. On the contrary, the murmur, the broken language that is nothing more than jargon, the vomiting of paradigms and slogans, the deadly silence of the cavils and military coups reveal a kind of pact with the past, which seeks to project – and forge – an opaque, sinister, fearful, disjointed country.

But let us not forget: this world relies on reasonable intellectual support, with the ignorance of certain media and the self-interested encouragement of supposed mediators, who give shelter to hatred and even try, for personal and group interests, to minimize the loss of language and propose that this minefield of hatred and death is a political project.

* Luiz Roberto Alves He is a research professor at the School of Communications and Arts at the University of São Paulo and member of the Alfredo Bosi Chair at the Institute of Advanced Studies at USP. Author, among other books, of Build curricula, train people and build educating communities (Avenue) [https://amzn.to/42bMONg]

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