By EUGENIO BUCCI*
A philosopher once said that hell is other people. Nothing to object to. But for Donald Trump, other people's hell is heaven.
The other day, while watching an interview on an internet TV channel, I saw a capitalist say that, in order to make more money, he needs to leave his “comfort zone”. Oh, what a cliché. From what I could understand, the “comfort zone” would represent, for him, an invitation to complacency and unproductive laziness. Therefore, a state of relaxation and calm would be a moral vice; the businessman without leisure must always count on a dose of distress, nervousness and even fear, or he will not be willing to take risks, even calculated ones. Moral of the story: comfort is not good for the ringing of cash registers.
Another capitalist, this one older, when he had an investment bank on Avenida Faria Lima, used to tell his associates that he didn’t like “fat cats.” He wasn’t referring to felines, of course. He was talking about men. In his dictionary, a “fat cat” was a former promising young man who quickly settled into a comfortable position and was satisfied with his gains in fat, not with dollar signs.
From then on, the indolent “fat cat” bought a country house in a gated community with a helipad and no longer wanted to have any dangerous adventures. According to the legendary banker’s teachings, the “fat cat” was a pest. When he identified one, he would fire it immediately.
The expression “fat cat” did not become popular; it was only used by the initiated. The other expression, “comfort zone”, became a cliché in the corporate world. Every now and then, someone comes along and says something bad about the “comfort zone”, a universal sign of slowness, procrastination, ineffectiveness and lack of initiative (public or private).
The ideology works exactly like this: the boss's idiosyncratic pet peeves are elevated to unshakable canons of virtue for the employee. Stand up, oh, victims of hunger! Escape your comfort zone!
Yes, I'm being ironic. If I'm serious, I'd say that the "comfort zone" is a bad joke. In the life of a billionaire, who doesn't need to know how much his children's school fees cost and who changes jets every year, it might even be fun to break the routine every now and then and challenge the peace and quiet, just a little. But in the lives of the rest of humanity, a bit of tranquil stability is a good thing. It should be celebrated, never repudiated.
I, for my part, prefer to applaud. Long live comfort, and long live the area that surrounds it. Long live the job that offers comfort. The guy already goes through indescribable hardships every day with the flooding in the neighborhood, the police on the loose, the skyrocketing price of bananas, the governor recording a video telling us to eat bananas with the peel, his friend being murdered in a robbery and, at work time, he still has to put up with bosses who threaten him with white-collar terrorism just because, in their religion, comfort is counterproductive. It's not possible.
Comfort is good. Furthermore, comfort is a human right, and the best of our existence – beauty, contemplation, rest and enjoyment – comes when we feel safe and moderately happy, not when we are pressed by fear or need. Only in the mind of a usurer does discomfort bring benefits to the company's balance sheet and to the progress of society. Let's talk about ideology.
That said, I'll change the subject. Donald Trump, now in office at the White House, said that what will now count in the United States is “meritocracy.” Let all the alarm bells ring. What could meritocracy mean in the language of the Republican leader? Is it something good? Let no one have any doubts: there is much more merit in a homeless person who spends the night under an overpass and doesn't commit suicide the next morning than in a daddy's boy, or even Donald, who never had to sweat his tie to be able to have lunch.
When I hear Donald Trump talk about merit, I feel like pulling the lever on the ejector seat. His own. The president of the United States must also believe that the “comfort zone” needs to be eliminated; just look at what he promotes in the Gaza Strip, in Guantanamo, in the immigrant homes in Newark, in the universities that study democracy, in the news agencies and in Ukraine.
A philosopher once said that hell is other people. Nothing to object to. But for Donald Trump, other people's hell is heaven. His. That worries him much more. Meritocracy? Scare me, I say, please.
Wilhelm Reich used to open his books with the same epigraph: “Love, work and wisdom are the sources of our life. They should also govern it.” Sadly, what governs our lives is the ideology of the “comfort zone,” the “fat cat,” and “meritocracy.” Protagoras said that man is the measure of all things. Well, in Trumpism and its adjacencies, money is the measure of all things, including man.
In the prologue of his book The tyranny of merit (Editora Alfaguara), Michael J. Sandel wrote that there was “a toxic mix of arrogance and resentment” in the force that brought Donald Trump to power in 2016. In 2024, the mix was worse.
* Eugene Bucci He is a professor at the School of Communications and Arts at USP. Author, among other books, of Uncertainty, an essay: how we think about the idea that disorients us (and orients the digital world) (authentic). [https://amzn.to/3SytDKl]
Originally published in the newspaper The State of S. Paul.
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