The victory of moral agendas as a guide to chaos.

Cecília Meireles stated that "we deserve death because we are human, and war is waged by our own hands, by our minds shrouded in centuries of shadow, by our strange and unstable blood, by the orders we carry within us that remain unexplained."

I don't know if we deserve death, hunger, misogyny, wildfires, attacks on culture, the press, indigenous people, and Black people, even though the war was indeed waged with the participation of our hands. The same hands that cast the 22 at the ballot box. Sadly, these are also the hands lent to the owners of capital every day as a workforce. 

Blaming the population for their (our) own misfortune is not enough to understand the appalling picture of the elections. We need to follow the strategies that the Brazilian people have been pursuing in the face of the growing instability and vulnerability of the social situation. The last decade has seen hunger and debt return, pensions shrink and the expected working life increase, college cease to be an option, the pandemic take thousands of lives due to poor health management, weapons become instruments of mediation instead of dialogue, the uberization of work, the loss of guiding influence of institutions, the cognitive confusion of post-truth and fake news, and even inflamed calls for the return of the military dictatorship.

From this perspective, I would like to reflect on the election results. The chaos in which we are immersed has led the masses to cling to moral and conservative agendas as a form of guidance. The media no longer guides us towards the truth. The law is no longer capable of guiding us towards justice. Outsourcing no longer allows for the establishment of lasting employment relationships. The pandemic has shown that everything can end tomorrow.

So, what is left for us? To know what is right, to discern good from evil, to be, despite all this, a citizen of values. In this search for a hollow log in the midst of a rough and murky sea, moral agendas emerge: defense of the traditional family, the right to life from conception (or simply, no to abortion), prohibition of drugs, reduction of the age of criminal responsibility, human rights for the right kind of humans, stigmatization of the LGBTQIAP+ population as deviant, abnormal, perverted or sinful, identification of feminism with a murderous left...

A large part of Bolsonaro's supporters were elected based on this discourse: Carla Zambelli, Damares Alves, Bia Kicis, just to mention a few women elected and strongly supported by Michelle Bolsonaro, one of the pillars of her husband's campaign, with strength among the evangelical electorate.

If anyone emerged victorious at the polls on October 02nd, it was moral agendas, as they bring an apparent sense of security to those who have already lost everything, including their sense of purpose. Conservative morality provides a fallacious justification that, even without anything material, I am still "a good citizen."

Let's not fall into widespread and unreflective pessimism: our neighbors are not like Bolsonaro, they weren't all closeted in conservative closets. They are simply people who suffer and need lifelines (or oxygen!) to stay alive. Unfortunately, the right has known how to offer the kind of lifeline that appears to be the most accessible and safest in an emergency. The nation's current pact is a moral one.