By FERNANDO NOGUEIRA DA COSTA*
Idiots unaware of harming themselves and others, cannot accept points of view, ideas or cultures that differ from their doctrine
By choosing to live apart from life in a community with an academic background, instead of studying more, the idiot judges himself superior to this collective he despises. He transmits this intolerance or scientific denialism to his descendants and shares it with friends in his “echo chamber”.
Idiots unaware of hurting themselves and, worse, others, cannot accept points of view, ideas or cultures that diverge from their doctrine, imposed by family, religious tradition and the distorted idea of homeland as submissive to the Armed Forces. These received the exclusive constitutional mission of defending the national territory, but this is not understood by uneducated people without an educational effort.
The reactionaries react against it, as they find it very difficult to understand the diversity by which the world is formed. Anyone who thinks differently would be indoctrinated, either by the “atheist left and personification of the devil”, or by Science, researched in public Universities, all dominated by these “cummunist people”.
Anachronistic, they imagine thinking for themselves by sharing memes in a robotic way. The idiot thinks he is well defended from questions if he stays closed in his “bubble”.
I decided to test these hypotheses, in an impressionistic way, by watching testimonies presented in the report of BBC News Brazil, titled “Bolsonaro voters talk about government and corruption”.
Typical old reactionaries, residents of Copacabana, all dressed in green-and-yellow, said the following. “I consider myself a Bolsonarist because I don't see another politician. Brazil has no other”. “I am not a Bolsonarist, but a patriot”. “I am not a Bolsonarist, I am against corruption!” “I am a Bolsonarist, I am for the family, for everything normal, that is, we have morals, have principles”.
A young woman with an alienated middle-class appearance claimed to have voted for the dictum whose, "despite his aggressive way against women, for the Workers' Party not to return to Power". Another elderly woman recognized: “he is temperamental, he says everything that comes to his mind, and people are strange, authentic people. It's a little scary, but he's wonderful!”
Said an aggressive one: "He is frank, like me..." Said a male: "He was always so rude, I don't see why he changed the position of president".
One fervent believer cries out: “He did his best. There was the pandemic… But he got it right more than he got it wrong”. A young man sees no alternative: “Today he is the harnessed horse for us to ride”. Another condescending justifies his choice: “He reduced the price of gasoline and granted assistance to greatly improve daily life”.
Another lady recognizes: “I don't understand nor follow politics, but I am against any kind of corruption, if it is proven that it belongs to your family, you have to punish”. A more popular gentleman thinks “his family is involved in 'cracks', as are all politicians. His problem is to put his hand on his children's heads. As for him, I see nothing!”
A young woman also dressed as a Brazilian flag is asked about corruption in the ministries and in the family of the disqualified president – and is unable to answer: “Hum… [laughs]” Are you going to vote for him?! “Of course, that guy… what's his name again?” Alexandre Moraes. “Ah, he is a super-corrupt man! Everything done by the president, he overthrew, released the guilty, arrested the innocent”.
Another elderly woman states: “When we go out on a march, asking for freedom, it does not concern the president, but the dictatorship of the Supreme Court”. With no response to the reporter's contradictory argument, she just asks: "Are you a communist?!".
This is a sample of the political behavior of this niche of the middle class. It is a support base for the emergence of Tupiniquim fascism over armed order based on threats of violence and murder. To understand it, it is worth rereading Wilhelm Reich's book Mass psychology of fascism (Martins Fontes, original from 1933).
Accusing the conservative behavior of the masses of being “irrational”, of constituting a “mass psychosis” or a “collective hysteria” does nothing to shed light on the root of the problem and understand the reason why this fraction of social class supports the discourse fascist. After all, the neo-fascist attacks collective interests and reserves real estate wealth for his clan, acquired with cash/dirty money.
Wilhelm Reich locates the expression of the mass psychology of fascism in a certain form of family, with the repression of sexuality at its center, and in the character of the “lower middle class”. For him, the repression of the satisfaction of material needs differs from the repression of sexual impulses. The first leads to revolt, while the second prevents rebellion. This is because it removes it from the conscious domain, “fixing it as the defense of morality”.
The very repression of the impulse is unconscious, not seen by the person as a characteristic of his character. The result, according to Wilhelm Reich, "is conservatism, fear of freedom, in short, the reactionary mentality".
This middle class sample (carioca/paulistana/brasiliense) is not composed of the only ones to experience this conservative process, but it lives in a unique way. One imagines himself to be above the others (adversaries to be extirpated) and to represent the nation. They practice the defense of social barriers, imposed as a guarantee of the survival of self-esteem. They fear the breaking of the order in which they are balanced, precariously, and, for this reason, they ask for control and repression of the poor and black people desirous of social emergency.
Aligned with the military defense of the “nation” (armed homeland), they adopt “moralism” in terms of customs, linked to prejudice, misogyny, homophobia, racism, etc. They conclude this discourse with the defense of the “family” and the clamor for “order”. Fascist behavior cannot be reduced to manipulation and trap, but is found in immediate awareness and affective relationships regarding recognition or reception by uneducated people also dressed in green-and-yellow.
The act of welcoming expresses an action of approximation, a “being with” and a “being close to”, that is, an attitude of social inclusion, which also occurs in evangelical temples, even under the charge of tithes to obtain this feeling of recognition individual. This attitude implies seeking to be in face-to-face relationship with many people similar to you, either in appearance or in possession of a few intelligent ideas.
Hence the frivolous replacement of Datafolha, a survey carried out using a scientific sampling method, by Datapovo, an impressionist visualization of street demonstrations. Both on the right and on the left, many imagine these to be decisive for the electoral result, like the noisy minority in delimited spaces in a few metropolises expressing a repressed desire for the silent majority to scream in the public square. The former does not represent the latter, on the contrary, the majority wants peace and not violence!
A visual sample is a small portion of something given to see, but it is not sufficient to prove or analyze a certain quality of the whole. The holistic view needs a representative sample for the collective behavior of the entire electorate to be evaluated or judged a priori.
In quantitative research methodology, a sample is a set of data collected and/or selected from a statistical population by a defined procedure. As the population is very large, making a census or a complete enumeration of all existing values is impossible quickly with few resources.
The sample generally represents a subset of a manageable size. There is a scientific method to make inferences or extrapolations from the sample to the population. However, the ignorant mass does not (re)know him.
The best way to avoid bias or non-representation, present in street demonstrations, is to select a random sample, also known as a probabilistic sample. In it, each individual member of the population has a known, non-zero chance of being selected as part of the population.
Stratified sampling, like society, consists of dividing or stratifying the population into a certain number of subpopulations. They should not overlap, in order to extract a sample from each stratum. But this type of sampling is not always used when different data collection methods are applied to different parts of the population.
In the Datafolha sample, the range of up to two minimum wages is 51%, while the preference for the PT is 27%. This represents 42,2 million votes. My “thesis”, a hypothesis defended with data, is that Lula's expected victory, despite his rival's improvement, is basically due to poor PT supporters. Not all electoral polls sample by preference party. A decisive electoral factor is that the PT is the only party with a sympathetic popular mass. This is the real reason for "anti-PTism". Resentment.
*Fernando Nogueira da Costa He is a full professor at the Institute of Economics at Unicamp. Author, among other books, of Economic analysis methods (Context).
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