Brazil: the agony of the world of ideas

photo from Wikimedia Commons

When I saw the reactions on the web after the knife attack on Bolsonaro - right-wing presidential candidate of the Brazilian elections - I was thinking from where come so much hate and stupidity.

For you to understand what I'm going to trying to say, let me do an overview on the Brazilian scenario.

Brazil was never a free-market economy. The leftist thinking has been prevailing over the years. The big state interventions, the almost unbearable state machine size and culture builded with the shape of the political correctness - like it has been happened in several societies over the world - are the main social-political-economic structure.

But Bolsonaro did not gain high levels of popularity just because he does not agree with the left-wing thinking. His speech is full of polemical views, aggressive words to his opposites and often he exceeds the strength. Sometimes, he even seems like Donald Trump.

He wants to revoke the laws that restrict the civil fire weapons license and defends the violence uses from the police against the criminals - which gave to him the label of violence. His speech is against political correctness, he supports old methods of education and traditional sexual orientation views - which it gave to him the label of homophobia and chauvinism. But, even with these labels and like we can see in the polls, his speech echoes in the population.

Whereas, the leftist government was involved in many corruptions scandals, their last president suffered impeachment and triggered a crisis in the country's economy. To make matters worse, the greatest leftist leader - Lula - was arrested for passive corruption and money laundering charges. Even so, the left-wing parties, mainly PT (Lula's party) have big chance to win the elections. Even Lula being arrested, he has biggest votes intentions, because many people think it is political persecution.

In this polarization scenario, while Bolsonaro followers call PT party of “gang of organized crime” and Lula a thief, we found some unbelievable opinions in the social media about attack: some people imply Bolsonaro was guilty for the stabbing on his own belly, because his speech style incites the violence; others celebrated in the web and lamented the “job was not finished”, and still others don’t believe that attack occurred, all that are conspiracy lie.

from Youtube

This happens when the political opinions runaway from the world of the ideas and seem that all thinking is summarized in type of football team t-shirt. The ideas and arguments are organized with passionate criteria instead the democratic, ethical and moral values.

That’s the point: violence is not an exclusivity of only one ideological orientation. But when the ideology puts you in a war state, you only see goals, things that should matter lose importance and just are placed out of your view.

We only can waiting that the press and opinion makers keep them speeches into the pacifications limits, even we know that themselves helped increase this tension scenario. Specially if, after the conclusion of the police investigations, we have an ordered crime from some left-wing group and not a lone wolf action like we have been want to believe.