the conservative thinking

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By FLAVIO AGUIAR*

Mental indigence and moral bankruptcy

Stupidity and immorality are contagious. Brazilian conservative thinking has abdicated intelligence and ethics. He replaces them with two simulacra: opportunistic cunning and the cult of lies.

It is no wonder that its showcase is the indigestible compound of a dismal salad: a militia president who lies incessantly with his insane family, incompetent military in pajamas or uniform, fallacious to the extreme, as well as addicted to the “financial mouth” of the positions government agencies, a judiciary apparatus that acts on the debris of the Law, parliamentarians and other politicians addicted to budget favors, journalists and others "influencers” that viralize arguments bought in the marketing of false ideas, pastors and other religious people who are equivalent to the former vendors of the temple, that Jesus would expel with whips as stated in the Bible that he did in Jerusalem, doctors and other pseudo-health agents who boast of miraculous cures, businessmen and rentiers who don't care about the country that feeds and enriches them, and so on. And worse: come.

One of the objectives of the coups d'état triggered by operations such as Lava-Jato was to exclude the left from the debate on national public policies. This objective was achieved in part. It wasn't fully victorious thanks to alternative media. This, although fragmented, maintains an open space for the circulation of non-orthodox ideas of different shades. The commercial media, despite now intending to rehearse an opposition to the occupant of the Planalto Palace and his manic-obsessive behavior, maintains its loyalty to the manic-depressive ideology of economic fundamentalism that governs his mismanagement.

The victory in removing the lefts had a paradoxical effect: the triumphant conservative thought was left without an “opposite reference”, as it cannot recognize the pertinence in a debate with ideas that are not its own.

The paradox is that the victory brought two other side effects that became central to this trajectory. The first side effect was the replacement of the political dispute by a war between gangs and gangs. The leaders of conservative thought stopped presenting projects for the country. In its place, a kind of ferocious struggle for the booty-Brazil took place, involving everything from parish militiamen to judicial, military, media and other leaders, passing through olavistas, pastors, blesseds, pious and anachronistic militants of a fanatic cold war against the communism.

The other side effect on conservative thinking was the institutionalization of outright lying as a discursive practice. This second effect brings permanent damage: the lie becomes a Rubicon of no return, that is, once crossed, there is no turning back. One must always lie more and more, because a fanciful pact is established between the speaker and the speakers that completely elides any sense of reality.

Recent examples: the occupant of the Planalto Palace says that about the pandemic “he didn’t make a single mistake”, or something similar. Well, here's a lie that's true: in fact, he didn't make a mistake once, he made a mistake every time he opened his mouth about it. Already his assholes supporters accept this lie as the most absolute and holy true truth.

There are other lies that are seeping through all sides and pores. It has become common and in good standing, among highly regarded commentators, to compare the current occupant of the Planalto Palace with Lula and Dilma, based on the belief that, after all, extremes meet because they are faces of the same coin. , in a political fantasy. The balance would be in another fantasy, the “political center”. Fantasy? Yes, fantasy, because what really exists is not the center, but the “Centrão”.

Another of these lies, which invades the speeches even of commentators who do not consider themselves conservative: the current occupant of the Planalto Palace is compared with Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro. What is the background of this lying attitude: it is the disbelief that there is something called “American imperialism”, a deep-seated fantasy. The desminister of diseconomy boasts that either one follows the mantra of his excesses or Brazil sinks. The truth, which neither he nor his accomplices can accept is that Brazil has already sunk, thanks to its economic policies, and is disappearing in a pandemic, blood and unemployment.

The occupant of Itamaraty boasts that he is proud that his country is becoming an international pariah, as if this were a decoration. He goes to Israel in search of a miracle spray that will replace the bankrupt chloroquine. He and the minister of inhuman rights attend a UN meeting to talk about a fantasy country that doesn't exist except maybe on a flat planet. Comparing this gang to Pinocchio is an insult to the stick figure.

Commentators who helped create this predicament today pose as Democrats, trying to cover their shame with a sieve, knowing full well what they did last summer.

All the leaders of this conservative thought do not limit themselves to talking about a Brazil that does not exist. They speak of a world that does not exist. They place themselves as heralds of a triumphant modernity that only exists in their lack of habitual and habitual imagination. The whole world is drenched in the pandemic and resounding failures of unbridled rentism that has multiplied the fortunes of the old billionaires and some new ones, alongside the multiplication of the most miserable misery in human history, because lived at a time when we already have full resources to eliminate it or at least mitigate it to a large extent. This rosary of crocodile tears never ends. That's why I stop here. One last reminder: I have been saying, to the scandal of some coreligionists, that Brazil lacks coherent and consistent conservative thinking. Its existence would sharpen the strength of debate on the left.

But I doubt that this will happen, at least in the short and medium term. Conservative thinking has sunk into the swamp it has invented for itself. The left will have to fend for themselves to get out of this quicksand.

As usual, our “elites” (thus, written in pedantic French), continue to show themselves capable only of offering themselves to the great centers of international capitalism as mere local administrators of their power, willing to hand over their fingers to maintain the privilege of the their rings, at the expense of their country, which they treat as if it were still a hereditary captaincy, and its people, for whom they cherish deep and irremediable contempt.

* Flavio Aguiar, journalist and writer, is a retired professor of Brazilian literature at USP. Author, among other books, of Chronicles of the World Upside Down (Boitempo),

 

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