Destiny and the State

To understand the mentality of any person, family, community, or tradition, it is necessary to know, more than the external conditions that shaped the scenery of their existence, the free acts and decisions that distinguished them from all others and established the profile of their identity, the pattern of their most typical and enduring reactions. Even forgotten, even pressed down to the bottom of the unconscious, these self-acquired marks of individuality will follow the creatures – the entities – to the end of their days. Positive or negative, they can never be removed, only – if negative – compensated, through hard work, by new free decisions that neutralize to a certain extent their undesired effects.

"Choice makes destiny", used to say the great Leopold Szondi. A succession of individualizing choices leaves its mark in a history, a biography, a community, a people, much more than any exterior happening that can occur by chance or by the initiative of others.

The Portuguese, for instance, suffered the earthquake in Lisbon and the napoleonic invasion. They were marked by these events, but not as deeply as they had already marked themselves by the free enterprise of the navigations that turned them, forever, into discoverers of the world. The earthquake and the invasion survived only as marks from the past. But the navigation epic is the permanent signal of Portuguese identity.

Another example: the Jewish suffered the Holocaust, but not because they wanted it. It came to them from outside, like an affliction. It marked them deeply, but not to the point of erasing their identity. This identity was born from what they have done, on their own accord, along time. And what they have done of most important was to accept, freely, the Law of Moses. Without the Holocaust, they would be as Jewish as they always were. They would not be so without the Law they chose, that God himself did not impose on them, but only offered: "If thou accept me, Israel, I am thy God". Even the decision to call Holocaust the sufferings that were imposed on them during the II World War shows the victory of the old identity, freely acknowledged, over the dissolving impact of an external hostile force. Interpreting the new evil in the light of biblical symbolism, the Jewish reconnected the two halves of their thread of destiny, which the unpredicted brutality wanted to separate. Yes, choice, and not occurrences, makes destiny.

The two examples I gave are of dignifying choices. But perverse, criminal, dreadful choices mark destiny as deeply. Such is the mark of lines of thought and ideologies that promise to make the State the reformer of society. Since birth, all of them, without exception, chose as their main, unmistakable line of action that thing which is proper of the State, that actually defines and distinguishes it from all other institutions: the monopoly of physical violence. The State is the State only because it has the legitimate right – coerced or consented – of the use of force.

Whoever proposes to modify society through the State – instead of doing it through religion, culture, personal influence, free association of individuals or the intermediary powers – knows, since the beginning, that essentially their line of action is force. The State can, of course, also make use of other means. But none of them – culture, education, propaganda, or prosperity – are innately and exclusively of the State. They are casual borrowings. Even the domination that the State might have over them lies on the control it might exert over its own medium, which is force. That is why any light and affable methods it might use are nothing but, in fact, provisory substitutes of force. As soon as they fail in giving the desired results, either the State enters a period of crisis or of force. Tertium non datur: there is no third alternative.

Betting on the State is , therefore, to bet on violence. This bet indelibly and unmistakably marks the vocation of all modern ideologies, either of reforming or revolutionary inclination, that see on the State the motor and promoter of social well-being. I do not refer only to nazism and socialism. Even forms infinitely minor of statism cannot escape the logic of things. Even men of markedly democratic convictions like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt – or, among Brazilians, the military that succeeded each other in presidency after Marshal Castelo Branco – ended up promoting authoritarism and committing violence against their own people from the moment that, either through conviction or lack of imagination to conceive alternatives, made the State the active center of social life and chose it as the essential means for the realization of their ideals. Is it not significant that the government of the great liberator Lincoln was also the originator of concentration camps, which the sincere democrat Roosevelt instated against Japanese descendants the prison for racial suspicion? Is it not significant that the Brazilian military government, created to restore democracy, threatened by the communists, ended up fossilizing itself in a repressive apparatus that the government itself did not know how to dismantle? And at the same time that, making the commitment to defend free market, expanded the State machine more than any of its predecessors?

Even more eloquent is the example of the "Whigs", the British progressive party, precursors of the Welfare State, who invented, before Stalin, the "weapon of hunger", with the infamous Corn Laws, from 1828, which, applied against Ireland, reduced its population from eight to four million in a century.

But, if true democrats were led to do these things by the simple fact that they bet on the State as an instrument to improve society, how much more evil will be done by men taken with the idea that the State has not only to improve, but to recreate or revolutionize society? How much bigger and lasting will be the evil they will produce if, instead of revolutionizing only the structure of a determined society, they intend to use the force of the State to create a new world civilization, modify from top to bottom the cultural heritage and moral principles, the religious values, the elementary portrayal of perception, and, on the whole, human nature?

That is why, when eminent intellectuals announce to us, like they did on the Social Forum in the city of Porto Alegre, that "another world is possible", what we must conclude is that the hundred million dead of the socialist experience, plus the forty million of nazi-fascism, are not enough to satiate the Prometeic ambition of the statal inventors of worlds.