By LUIZ ROBERTO ALVES*
The possible candidates for 2022 are prey to the old liberal mansion, which has nothing to give the entire country
It is not about seeing the candidates for the leadership of the Republic as things. It is about, despite the use of what instead of who, to take seriously a small text by Celso Furtado, published in 1984.[1] In it, the economist, symbol of Sudene and art lover, begins his text invoking a time of crisis in which our identities (or identifications) are questioned. It is worth quoting him: “In times of crisis, when all references seem uncertain, the old question 'who are we' takes on full validity, as if man needed to be challenged to become aware that in his future there will always be an element of mystery, something irreducible to his lived experience. If we ask 'what are we', it's because we are in an identity crisis, we feel uncomfortable in our skin or in the clothes we are wearing”.
Furtado analyzed the “certainties” of the years from 1920 to 1950, with industrialization and urban impacts, despite the fact that they always remained with feet of clay, as they only satisfied the wealthy classes. Even worse is that from the 1980s onwards, he saw an even greater nuisance, the very ruin of the old system. Furtado shows that “the new mansion created in that industrialization and urbanism system shows cracks in all its walls”. It summarizes: economic growth is not development. It may not even be part of it. In our case, perfect. At the same time, much worse, considering the very little wealth and the enormity of poverty in the rhythm of cybernetic exploitation, surveillance by algorithmic intelligence and previously unthinkable accumulations of power. Furtado and other-others opened the channels of analysis and the cracks have already become chasms.
There is no need to carry out new sociopolitical analyses, so exquisitely seen in the earth is round; it is enough to jump to the present to affirm that all the factors of such economic growth pressure and violate the common home, Gaia, and as shown by both international studies and the broad youth linked to environmental movements in their networks. To give a strong example, Brazilian agribusiness, full of courtiers and kissers, plus deforestation and violence against traditional communities, play and will play up all the numbers that will lead us to successive destructions resulting from local and global warming. About this, the current impression is that we prefer destruction to environmental redemption. To see. There are still those who listen to Mrs. Teresa Cristina and her troupe. Until when?
What are the candidates? Their names matter less. Judging by the punctual comments heard and read here and there, none of them hold up in their skin and clothes. Shaken by the old mansion and the new ones, real and virtual, full of social wounds, there will be no true discourse in them because there is no repertoire of political language capable of understanding the real and profound Brazil, including its cybernetic facets, to then enunciate it. it to the people divided and repressed in the combinations of the old Casa Grande and the new.
A repertoire of political language is made up of historical, ethical, aesthetic and ecological-environmental forces, much more important than economic data, which one reads and has seen everywhere. When those forces return to visit economic data in historical reading and face them, the repertoire becomes pregnant with the impossible and there is no possible truth in the speeches of these people who never had an exceptional understanding of the enormous trouble in the country.
The easy and expected path (whether in bipolarity or in the presence of tertiary) is that of the mutual search for defects, expectation of stumbling blocks and that of mild speech, which touches on points that have already been scratched for a long time and that only increased the known inequalities. A game of mirrors and make-up until the ballot box is defined.
In that text, Furtado showed that the high performance of aesthetic and artistic forces does not mean social and political progress at the time of their hard clashes, because it can mean brilliance in decay, although it is a pointer of the future. In fact, nothing will be possible without tremendous collective political will that moves all the creative forces of the people, which is not even remotely visible. Historical, ethical and environmental forces will not compose the political discourse for 2022, because they would, if stated, completely break with the old capitalist mansion, often endowed with the competence of a Phoenix and, therefore, the bearer of reliability even for those who say the opposite from the mouth out.
The possible candidates for 2022 are prey to the old liberal mansion, which has nothing to give to the whole country, but it seems that it has to give to those who carry the myths of interest. The opinion became a definitive enunciation in the cybernetic universe, under the algorithmic rage.
Perhaps the political speech of 2022 is the weakest of the Republic. No one will have the strength to jump over the tsunami of horror and mediocrity created since 2016. While horror was establishing itself, the cyber-capitalist universe created new domination gadgets, which surpass the understanding of the vast majority of the population. That political will to move creative forces from the races of the diverse country needs to go through a passover political, the resurrection. This Furtado did not foresee. He trusted Culture.
What is more plausible is that partitions, insulating tape and adhesive plasters are proposed in favor of the mansion gone mad. With the due support of those who fall apart for power. The great majorities will carry out the ritual, even if those who are barely in their skins (despite not confirming it) make the speech of the bandages of the liberal-capitalist order. And find good reasons for it.
What are we? Who are the candidates for 2022?
The question refers to a deep reflection on identity. If not, at first, from all Brazilian men and women, certainly from political leaders. Does it happen that every supposed political leader would have to find and enunciate, at a high level (to remind Celso again), what are the permanent values of our cultures, which move in the warps of history, between bumps and shocks? And if these people are in fact leaders, the answers would engage their immersion in a discovery that would lead, continuously, to assess the political will for creative cultural transformation moved by the values revealed in the most sincere search, starting with the denial of any patch in the Casa Grande that made countless generations unhappy and produced, by its very existence, millions of slave quarters.
No expectations, therefore, given what the candidates are today. Not even proportional elections. We may have to wait decades for electoral acts to be ecological acts.
Opening the cracks for justifications, agreements, conformisms, approaches without north and business, follows the damaged Mansion in its neon glow, ready to, once again, fill the victors' alcove with shine. The real country continues to challenge for the interpretation of its cultures.
Brazil does not know Brazil. And he is horrified to try a new path.
* Luiz Roberto Alves is a senior professor at the School of Communications and Arts at USP.
Note
[1] Celso Furtado. “What are we?”. In: Brazil Magazine.