Diffuse Indoctrination

OLAVO DE CARVALHO
O Globo, January 27, 2001

Translated by Assun��o Medeiros

A public that is contaminated by Marxist indoctrination to the marrow does not have � exactly because of that � the slightest idea it is being indoctrinated. The first step of indoctrination is purely cultural, diffuse, and does not aim to give the individual any explicit political conviction whatsoever, but only to shape his cosmovision according to the basic guidelines of the Marxist philosophy, given without that name, naturally, and presented as if it was general Knowledge, with a capital "K". With the exception of an extremely reduced number of intellectuals that have studied critically the communist movement, and of the people that are too poor to have received any education at all, rarely do we find a Brazilian citizen that is not already taken with this vision of the world, at least because they ignore it is a vision and not the world itself.

In especial, the explanation of history based in the Marxist scheme of the economically defined classes, which is the background for a more active indoctrination, can already be considered totally integrated to the thought schema of the media and the educated population, to the point that no one there has the awareness that it is just a theory among many. Everyone takes this theory as a direct translation of the reality we live. Even if it has little to do with the real distribution of forces in the Brazilian social panorama, the individual spontaneously appeals to its basic concepts � if not to its nomenclature � to express what he thinks is going on in society. Thus, for example, the state bureaucracy, instead of being viewed as an autonomous force, which is a characteristic trait of Brazilian society � and even though inside it is recruited the most part of the leftist militancy �, has become invisible enough that the effects of its actions can be attributed to the "dominant class", understood in the sense of "the rich" or "the capitalists". The middle class, who encompasses 46% of our population and includes almost all of the politically active people (especially from the left), has no conscience of itself as a distinct entity. Each person inside it, spontaneously, divides the social picture between "the rich" and "the poor", taking the party discourses as if they were trustworthy translations of the underlying sociological realities, and putting themselves among the poor, without noticing that the poor put them among the rich and, actually, envy and hate them more than any banker. The alienation between social reality and the self-explanatory discourse, in such circumstances, is total.

With equal ease, the comprehension of ideas as stereotyped expressions of class interest is projected over the image of our historical past, leveling like a bulldozer the fact that is easily proven � but Marxistically unexplainable � that in Brazil the ideological discourses almost never coincide with the objective interests of the social classes involved. In public education, in books, in the so-called educational programs on TV, the Marxist reduction of the cultural production to superstructures of class interests are already so deeply imbued in the current vocabulary that whoever desires to present some other version of history does not know where to start to explain himself and can even fall into the ridiculous situation of charging head-on into "common sense" (in the Gramscian sense of the term).

In a very comprehensible manner, but no less ironic because of that, the more limited the horizon of a person is to the canons of the Marxist vulgate, the more violently will this person react to the statement that there is Marxist propaganda in Brazil and, even more, to the idea that the communists have any power among us. Being invisible, as Ren� Gu�non used to say, is a thing of the essence of power itself.

A second phase of indoctrination is the one that will associate, to the class stereotype, the moral and emotional values necessary to awaken reactions of pleasure or displeasure whether the discourse sounds like something associated with the "class interests" of the kindly poor or the evil rich, even if, objectively, it has little to do with that. The discourse in favor of free enterprise, for instance, even though it speaks objectively in favor of an immense part of the poor population that makes a living from the informal economy, is rejected as a defense of the interests of the "�lite" and of the multinational companies, while the state-centralizing discourse, even though it does not make the least scratch in the interests of the richer class, and in fact strengthens the omnipotent bureaucracy that reduces the country to poverty through a scorching tributary burden, is better accepted as the expression of the interests of the "excluded". From alienation we then move on to hallucination. But, not by coincidence, this same anguish that comes from the vague intuition of madness is immediately used to generate more hate towards the stereotyped image of the "dominant class" � held responsible for all the evils and personified in individuals and groups that, in truth, are not dominant at all and function only as scapegoats, such as the military. To such an extent do these conventional symbols substitute the perception of the facts that an event like the World Social Forum, in Porto Alegre, is passively accepted by its nominal value of antiglobalist manifestation, regardless of the support it receives from ONU, the heart of the New World Order, as well as from a world network of Non-Governmental Organizations, that are to ONU what the arteries and veins are to the heart.