Macunaíma is my shepherd, I shall not want.

It's curious how perplexed we are by violence. When violence explodes in waves like the one we're seeing now, we often hear people say that nothing like this has ever been seen before in the history of this country. The landlord poses as a vestal virgin, cloaked in the mantle of the "cordial man," a type who conceals violence in religious and consumerist settings, forging the happiness of this tropical country, blessed by God and beautiful by nature.

The Brazilian people are violent, period. Enough with the hypocrisy. When the white Europeans landed on Brazilian shores, ragged, toothless, smelly, full of scurvy, syphilis, and thirsty for sex, indigenous men and women lived naked, in perfect harmony with the seas, rivers, and forests, at peace with their divinity spread all around. But it was a dangerous paradise. There were some tribes of cannibals here, fond of a succulent human thigh. They even ate Bishop Sardinha.

The Catholics sought to eradicate the pagan beliefs of the Indians and replace them with a single god. They instilled sin and guilt in them. They occupied the lands, corrupting the natives with trinkets, exterminating entire nations. Blood flowed through fields and forests. Because, in the view of the European whites, Indians had no soul, it became a sport to go out on Sundays to hunt natives. They shot to see them fall.

They tried to subdue them with whips. When they failed, they went to Africa and enslaved the black people. The marks of barbarity remain alive. So much so that "modern" architecture reproduces the colonial model in Brazilian residences. That is, it maintains the slave quarters within the living room, kitchen, and servants' quarters. A cubicle where they cram domestic workers, and adopt the "us and them" treatment. All this is considered "normal."

This same violence, a legacy of slavery, persists in social relations, especially in the workplace. Who is unfamiliar with exploitation, inhumane treatment, and moral harassment by bosses and supervisors? In relationships between husband and wife, between parents and children? Who doesn't know of people psychologically destroyed by moral harassment? People who wander through their daily lives, going back and forth from home to work, from work to home, consumed by grievous suffering caused by humiliation and belittling.

It's worth noting here that in left-wing parties, unions, and other entities, workplace harassment often occurs with extreme cruelty. This is especially true in organizations that present themselves as institutions of libertarian political pedagogy. There are unimaginable accounts. The educator Paulo Freire called this "oppression of the oppressed." In other words, many who have suffered oppression tend to become even more violent oppressors.

In the National Congress, there are draft laws to define workplace harassment as a crime, but groups, especially those supporting employers, are preventing their approval.

Violence, applause, and business.

It's also curious that many of the people who are "scared" by violence, for example, don't miss an MMA fight, that "human fight" that makes spectators cheer when the fighters are brutal. The more blood they're covered in, the more the audience cheers. The images boost viewership in the media. The owners of TV stations, websites, newspapers, magazines, and sponsors boost their multi-million dollar businesses and fill their pockets with money.

Many say that cockfighting is a sport, that it "educates," that it has rules, but they don't say that the rules were made by the very businessmen who exploit the business of violent events.

What we see around us are young people adopting MMA fighters as role models, glorifying machismo and violence as an affirmation of virility. The beauty standard now is the appearance of being tough and violent. Muscles and tattoos fuel narcissistic delusions, amplified by the small screens of cell phones, which have become hedonistic mirrors of modernity.

With this aesthetic, an ancestral, medieval conservatism resurfaces. And what does MMA fighting have to do with violence? Violence under the applause of fierce fans, shouting: kill!... kill!... kill!...

The same people attend masses, Sunday services, and MMA fights, each with their counterpart. In football matches, in traffic, at concerts, at parties, violence explodes, generating shocking images to the delight of media owners. These people exploit misfortunes and tears to exhaustion, with hypocritical, moralistic, and do-gooder attitudes, to profit even more from the audience. A feedback loop that dominates hearts and minds.

On TV programs, presenters speak directly to approximately 40 to 70 million people every day, in commentaries and editorials, as if they were authorities on the subject. Many incite barbarity, as presenter Shehearazade from SBT recently did, inciting the population to violence. On social media, journalists defended her tooth and nail, in a blind corporatism, to the point of considering her a "great professional." What can be expected from this kind of journalism?

Ultimately, the violence is latent, escalating in colorful waves of blood from time to time, and exposing the hypocrisy of society.

As the modernist Oswald de Andrade said, "no one escaped the fraudulent vagina and the oppressive penis."

The myth of the "cordial man" from the great historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda has been shattered. Why don't we choose to tie the hammock to the sky, turned towards the useless brilliance of the stars, as Macunaíma, our characterless hero imagined by the writer Mário de Andrade, wanted? The swaying of the creaking hammock might well resemble a country music tune, he said.

"Oh, how lazy I am!"

(*) Laurez Cerqueira is the author of, among other works, Florestan Fernandes – life and work; and The Other Side of Reality.