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 Throughout Internet debates, I have received
messages from young people that are proud of their precarious hold on the
Portuguese language and slam me as an elitist. Given my considerations regarding
the Supreme Ignoramus (reference to President Lula), is the reader to believe I
envy Him?
After all, despite his illiteracy, he enjoys more prestige than I. Such
responses prove, once and for all, that the Lula effect is spreading rapidly.
Surely we will not come to the kind of a Pol Pot regime, where even those
wearing glasses were shot, as suspects of reading. But a shortage of educated
men exists, men seen as an affront to this administration.
Proof of this are the barbarities proffered during the World Social Forum,
echoed through the press as if they were the purest form of expression of the
truth. Opening the Forum, the Supreme Ignoramus said: “some comrades who never
had a tough time in life and already have their places secured at good federal
public universities are against the Prouni scholarships (Program University for
All) because, in truth, they are against the poor studying, against the poor
having access to university.”
It’s the classical Stalinist technique of arguing, so admired by the Workers
Party, that of placing factitious arguments in the mouth of the adversary to
better punch them back. Who in this Brazil is against the access by the poor to
universities? I don’t know anyone and doubt the reader knows.
Worse yet: in his stunning difficulty to think logically, the President
attributes this wish to “some comrades”. What comrades? Supposedly from his
party, or they would not be comrades. Well, I doubt any Workers Party member, no
matter how polpotist he/she may be, is opposed to access to university to the
poor.
Shortly after, he claims: “When my term in office comes to the end, I am not
going to France or the United States to get my graduate degree. I’ll go back to
São Bernardo do Campo to live among my fellow comrade steelworkers.” Isn’t there
a single compassionate advisor to explain to the uncultivated man that without a
college degree you cannot go to graduate school? Not one journalist to denounce
such nonsense?
To the contrary, a theory has already emerged to explain the structure of the
reasoning process at the foundation of the Supreme’s impromptus. This
argumentation process, Professor Lucian Veiga, from the Rio de Janeiro
University Research Institute, calls “near-logic”, as if logic allowed for
gradation.
According to the researcher, “Lula is successful in establishing unspoken
agreements with the public when it comes to premises and presumptions within his
speeches because he shares the same beliefs and values of those involved in the
exchange.”
Translated to plain words: the presidential gibberish is justified due to the
comparable illiteracy level of his audience. For an illiterate, Lula is genial.
Perhaps the reader hasn’t noticed yet, but we are approaching that society
envisioned by Orwell, in 1984, where ignorance is wisdom.
“When he improvises – goes on the bearer of praises on duty – Lula has no
intention to be precise, seeking only to resonate with the public, just like the
behavior of any John Doe at a corner bar joint or Jane Doe on the front porch
with the neighbor.”
In other words, the nation’s President cannot go beyond Mr. and Mrs. Doe’s
handle on grammar, meaning that he has no intention to be precise. To his
rescue, the professor cites an English scholar, Stephen Toulmin, to whom common
language does not obey tenets of formal logic.
The day-to-day “near-logic” of the great majority would be based on
assumptions and deductions similar to logical operations, but without formal
value, since its logic is not founded on established premises, “but on personal
reasoning elevated to the condition of premise”. That is what journalist Dora
Kramer tells us, in her column in the newspaper Estado de São Paulo.
Words can do miracles. What previously we called sophism has now become
near-logic. Which reminds us a little of the expression near-pregnant, as if
pregnancy had room for near. In truth, not even knowing what sophism is, the
Near-Logical employs sophism continuously, by intuition.
His “personal reasoning elevated to the condition of premise” often doesn’t
come near sophisms, but plain gross lies, such as the facts he spoke of in order
to gloat about his administration at the World Social Forum.
When a university researcher demeans herself to brown-nose and defend
stupidity, we must conclude that even the country’s intelligentsia – or should
we say the academic ignorantsia – has definitely surrendered itself to the
uncultivated man’s power.
Just as the press surrendered to the power of the other analogous
near-logical, who attended such forum to enrich the nonsense already at full
capacity with remnants from the left meeting in Porto Alegre, Venezuelan Colonel
Hugo Chavez.
“There’s no solution for poverty and misery in the capitalist world, because
it’s capitalism that causes misery.” Applauses from the youthful audience,
ignorant as all the young love to inebriate themselves in untruths.
It even seems that this gentleman has not read the newspapers in the last
decade. Perhaps he hasn’t heard of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which truly
exposed misery – in fact, already well-known – of the socialist world and
brought on the massive exodus of people from the socialist paradise to the
capitalist inferno so abominated by Chavez.
Were the colonel to look up north, he would see happy citizens of the Cuban
paradise, risking their lives in make-shift boats or another rudimentary
floating device, heading north to the Yankee inferno.
Were he to extend his glance yet a bit farther to the north, he would see
Mexicans, Latinos and even Brazilians, risking drowning in rivers or dehydration
in the desert, also attempting to reach the capitalist inferno.
And were he capable of seeing a little farther, he would see Arabs, Africans,
Chinese, Romanians, and Albanians, starving to death in precarious vessels or
dying from asphyxiation in containers, trying to find a place in the sun of the
capitalist European inferno.
For an insane to utter insanities is normal, it is part of his nature. What
isn’t normal – and simply disturbing – is for fanatic youths to applaud and
enthrone him as an icon to be worshipped. Yet more disturbing is to see the
press that, afraid to be stigmatized by the left, reverberates without any
commentary such “near-logic” premises.
But the biggest trophy of this tournament of pearls SAT style was attained by
neither the Supreme Ignoramus nor the unfinished work-of-art of a colonel, but
by a scholar - Professor Emir Sader. Which at least demonstrates what we
already know: that stupidity is universal and does not respect the boundaries of
campuses.
“We are at the fifth edition of the event and we were not able to prevent the
war in Iraq”, said the university “near-logical”. Meaning that the World Social
Forum, this jamboree of pot smokers and insane idealists, intended to prevent
the war in Iraq no less?
They seem to have forgotten to send an official invitation to Bush. However,
as in the case of all the insane, Sader has sudden flashes of lucidity:
“it seems we don’t even exist.”
Finally, a drop of good logic.
Janer Cristaldo—he holds a PhD from University of Paris, Sorbonne—is
an author, translator, lawyer, philosopher and journalist and lives in São
Paulo. His e-mail address is janercr@terra.com.br.
Translated from the Portuguese by Eduardo Assumpção de Queiroz. He is
a freelance translator, with a degree in Business and almost 20 years of
experience working in the fields of economics, communications, social and
political sciences, and sports. He lives in São Paulo, Brazil. His email:
eaqus@terra.com.br.
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