On December 20, 1994, I published the following statement in a Rio de Janeiro newspaper: “Artists and intellectuals are one of the richest consumer markets for drugs and do not desire to lose their suppliers: when they defend the legalization of drugs, they are fighting their own battle. But they are not only consumers: they are disseminators through propaganda. If you have even a short memory you will remember that, in this country, the fashion of drugs in the sixties did not start in the lower classes, but in the universities, in drama groups, psychologist circles, surrounded by the prestige of a vice that was elegant and enlightening.”

The author of these lines was immediately diagnosed as a case of acute paranoia and complete social inaptitude. Letters with imprecations and asking for my head rained on the newsroom, all of them signed by illustrious people.

Four years later, a document from ONU, emitted just last week, confirms that this little fellow was right. The glamorization of vice is a formidable advertising support to illegal drug dealing. All combat to the international plague of drugs is condemned unless we are able, beforehand, to persuade all these beautiful little creatures of modern pedantry, intellectuals and artists, to control what comes out of their sweet, well-fed mouths.

I am not writing this down to announce my candidacy for prophet. I write this down to make known that the intellectuality, a class subsidized with money from the people – with the objective of telling this same people what goes on in the world – has almost completely forgotten its duty. When one of its members decides to fulfill it on his own, the class falls on top of him like a ton o bricks, as if he was a criminal, a traitor, an adulterous, a thoroughly bad guy. More and more they occupy themselves, on an international scale, with hiding the most obvious truths under a mantle of insensate speculation and hallucinogenic words. They have become a peril, maybe the greatest obstacle to the solution of all the great evils that afflict humankind. For intellectuality is the eye of the world, and Jesus Christ already said that, if the eye is corrupt, the whole body falls to ruin.

Paul Johnson demonstrated, in a memorable book (Intellectuals, 1988), that the modern type of intellectual, whose first incarnation he locates in Rousseau (he could also have said Voltaire, or Diderot), is substantially a consummate liar, an egocentric and immoral pervert, incapable of guiding himself and, regardless of that, still acts as guide to humanity.

In an essay published in 1942, Otto Maria Carpeaux believed to find the cause of intellectual perversion in the decadence of the universities, scaled down to become professional schools and ideology courses: “The illiterate are always right, because they are many and occupy a place of prominence, this ‘intellectual proletariat’... They read the books and decide on the success of the bookstore, criticize pictures and expositions, applaud and boo in the theater and in concerts, direct the currents of political ideas, and all of it with the authority that the academic degree gives them. In short, they perform the role of the élite. They are the nouveaux maitres, the señoritos arrogantes, graduated and violent; and we suffer the consequences, bitterly, cruelly.”

All of this is true, but not enough to explain the phenomenon, that began in the 18th century, and is prior to the fall of universities. The fall is the effect, not the cause. It is part of the general process of laicization of intellectual life that if, on the one hand, had the merit of freeing intelligence from the abuse from ecclesiastical authority, on the other hand did it by liberating the intellectuals from all moral obligation, by giving them, together with a healthy freedom, an excessive and unlimited authority. For the eye is the light of the body, but has natural limits: the reality around it. The abuse begins when the eye, giving up seeing, begins to invent. And this revolution does not begin with Voltaire or Rousseau, but with a man no one would say was dishonest or perverse. It begins with Immanuel Kant. He was the first that, denying our capacity to know reality as such, attributed at the same time to human intelligence the power to invent a valid world. With this, he involuntarily substituted the legitimate intention of knowing with an unlimited ambition for power. Observing the modern intellectual crap, it is time that someone knocked at the door of the impeccable Immanuel Kant and told him the fatidic words from that famous Brazilian comic samba:

- Here. Take back your child.