By ALEXANDRE ARAGÃO DE ALBUQUERQUE*
To get out of Bolsonarist dementia, it is necessary to break the ideology of the ruling class, and all political manipulation
How do you look at concrete reality? Based on what sensitivities, what knowledge, what sources of information and what analyzes of facts? How to take possession of a thought object, without allowing oneself to be manipulated by the media, nor by the mystification of State apparatuses, and thus observe it from different perspectives, in order to obtain some true knowledge? After all, the truth has in itself a typical liberating force that makes us change course or broaden our conviction. How can a democracy survive if republican institutions are not guarantors of the truth of facts and the law?
The answers to such questions are presented with the necessary seriousness due to proven social tensions, increasingly radicalized every day, arising from broad post-truth movements (fake news) and algoretics (ethical or unethical use of technology) conditioning behaviors and perceptions of individuals and groups.
A classic recent example in Brazil was the construction, by the legal-media conglomerate, of the “Sérgio Moro object”. The objective was to make him perceived as a kind of superman, above good and evil, in the fight against public corruption. I vividly remember dialogues between 2014 and 2018 with some friends from the Catholic Christian religious field, with a higher education level, who considered him “the champion of justice”, the one who would finally put the country on the path of decency.
These Catholic Christian friends had as their main source of information and observation of the object Sérgio Moro, Rede Globo (Jornal Nacional, Fantástico, Globe News etc.). It should be noted that Rede Globo was both the mentoring and driving force behind the conceptual development of the aforementioned object (Sérgio Moro) and publicity for anti-PTism. In addition, these friends dialogued with other opinion makers who shared the same global motivations. So your field of vision was rationally and emotionally conditioned; they firmly believed that the object Sérgio Moro was a kind of savior of the homeland.
It so happens that, on the other side of the river, the technical defense of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had already presented gigantic documentary evidence denouncing corruption (lawfare) of the Brazilian justice system, by the hands of Sérgio Moro, with the explicit objective of deepening the 2016 Coup, aiming at the illegal arrest of President Lula in 2018 (and the criminalization of leftist parties), removing him from the presidential race, to make possible the election of the captain of the far-right Bolsonaro. That is, the lavajatismo built by Moro-e-Globo was the incubator of the current militarized Bolsonarism.
This imposition on public opinion of the dominant view in the construction of the Sérgio Moro object takes us back to Gramsci's thinking on ideology. For Gramsci, dominant and dominated ideologies are structured by class struggle. Ideologies are experiences of the world that are formed in relation to domination and social conflict. Subaltern ideologies are those that incorporate domination in their subjection to the dominant ideology. Common sense would then be the assimilation of the dominant ideological discourse by the subaltern classes, when seeking to subject them to a particular conception of the world imposed as universal. In the case in question, to incorporate the universal perception of the object Sérgio Moro as an agent of good.
The ruling class, with its political-economic-cultural-institutional power, seeks to establish as universal something that is particular (its ideology) through a network of institutions with normative and repressive effects. Hegemony in civil society is ensured by the diffusion of social practices that configure class representations and values. Its metamorphosis into universals makes it difficult to identify and signal class domination. Therefore, hegemony is not something empty, abstract or only related to ideas; it has materiality and institutional expression through the devices of hegemony: schools, churches, means of communication, etc.
That said, only after the unforeseen action of Walter Delgatti Neto, the hacker who changed the history of the country, there is a change of course. Delgatti had the courage to look to the other side of the river when he denounced, through his initially accidental interceptions, the message exchanges of the prosecutors of the so-called Lava-Jato Operation, proving what the technical defense of President Lula had already amply documented in the records: that President Lula was the target of judicial corruption (lawfare), in a case conducted by a corrupt judge and dissolute prosecutors, as subsequently ruled by the Federal Supreme Court (STF). One wonders: what if Delgatti had not succeeded in his intention, what would the political reality of Brazil be like today? Would the Brazilian justice system's complicity with lavajatismo continue, as occurred at the beginning of that operation?
The film Don't look up by director Adam MacKay (The big bet), is a metaphor that matches the theme above: faced with the threat of the Earth's disappearance by a planet-destroying comet, accidentally discovered by a pair of astronomical scientists, who from then on seek the President of the United States to alert the world and take due measures, there is a population involved in the media life: memes, lacerations, celebrities, constant polarizations on their cell phones.
In the film, this cultural condition produces post-truth (defeat of scientific truth) in the turbulent sea of biases, of narratives that distort facts, of opinions that impose themselves as truths, relativizing reality. Political manipulation (calling people to look down) added to civil alienation in not wanting to look up (or not looking to the other side of the river) allowed the destruction of planet Earth by the comet.
The film's director, Adam MacKay, bet that the proximity of the comet would be the possibility of changing course and taking an attitude of the population in relation to the post-truth to which it is subjected. You made a mistake. In Brazil, we will have a great opportunity in the 2022 elections. Will we be able to look to the other side of the river? These days, on a bank, Bolsonaro is having fun with his Jet Ski in Florianópolis; on the other side, the people of Bahia are suffering from the flooding of their homes. What does all this accumulation of neglect, denialism, insensitivity and Bolsonarist perversity continue to tell us?
*Alexandre Aragão de Albuquerque Master in Public Policy and Society from the State University of Ceará (UECE).
