Dark winter

In her column yesterday morning in Folha de São Paulo (November 1st), Mônica Bergamo reported a large volume of criticism among judges of higher courts in Brasília regarding Bolsonaro's silence on the victory of President-elect Lula, aiming to encourage protests organized by his supporters throughout the country. According to the journalist, a minister of the Supreme Federal Court (STF) told her... "We're dealing with a kid.". Another member of the Supreme Court stated that "Democracy presupposes that you deal with authorities who are aware of their..." responsibilitywhich would not be the case for Bolsonaro." This silence has a name: authoritarianism, contempt for others and for democracy.

Given the above, the question that arises is why impeachment proceedings have not been initiated against Bolsonaro, since from the very first days of his presidency he has presented dozens of material reasons (crimes of responsibility and lack of decorum) to be removed from office. Therefore, there is a long-standing complicity between actors and institutions – from civil and political society – with the authoritarianism implemented in Brazil by Bolsonaro's supporters over the last four years.

Going back in time a bit, more precisely to January 11, 2019, unlike the concept expressed by the Supreme Court ministers about Bolsonaro, on the occasion of his farewell from the Army Command, General Eduardo Villas Bôas openly revealed in his speech the ongoing power project, conceived and defended by him and his military party. Loud and clear, the general stated that... "the Brazilian nation" celebrated the collective feelings that triggered "starting with Bolsonaro's election." The question is: what feelings would these be? The exacerbation of violence, hatred, social and regional discrimination, intolerance, authoritarianism, the loss of Brazil's international credibility, the dismantling of public assets and social security policies, the loss of purchasing power of the minimum wage, the indiscriminate spread of lies (fake news), Is it the disregard for the increasing hunger of Brazil's impoverished population, and the subservience to US intelligence agencies (CIA)? For Villas Bôas, the helmsmen of the authoritarian project, in order to unleash such collective sentiments, would be... "Bolsonaro, General Braga Netto, and (then) Judge Sérgio Moro" (aka Russo). That is, the ideological-fundamentalist-religious dimension, military coercion, the jurisdictional apparatus. All very well designed, planned and put into practice, as recent history attests.

Yesterday afternoon, Bolsonaro finally came forward to acknowledge his electoral defeat, without congratulating President-elect Lula, in a two-minute speech full of semiotic codes aimed at his followers protesting in the streets, refusing to accept the election results, blocking roads, harming the economy and social order, and restricting the population's right to come and go. This most fanatical fraction of his electoral base, fed by him daily via digital media and in his inner circle, does not accept any version of reality other than that interpreted by their leader. Thus, the ambiguity of his speech aimed at creating a version to inflame his militant, parrot-like followers, even in the face of consolidated defeat, typically configuring an action of... "dog whistle". This phenomenon finds a basis in science, typified in the concept of Cognitive Dissonance, for which there is an inconsistency between attitudes (individual or collective) and reality, in which subjects close themselves off, believing (belief) that they are right in their behaviors, refusing to see and accept other aspects of factual reality: the distance between what is believed and the way in which one behaves.
According to researcher and professor João Cezar de Castro Rocha (Uerj), Brazil is witnessing the consolidation of conditions for the establishment of a fundamentalist religious totalitarian state, a goal of the far-right, by using digital media platforms to produce collective cognitive dissonance. a parallel Brazil – which fractures the backbone of truly Christian and democratic Western values. The tactic focuses on the depoliticization of public debate, via extremist digital media, aiming to increase presence on social networks with abject content, achieving engagement through disinformation.

Faced with the discomfort of the inconsistency between belief and action, it is possible to minimize such suffering through several mechanisms: by refusing information contrary to one's beliefs or by seeking information that reinforces one's thinking. For example: Christianity, in its social doctrine, preaches the sharing of goods (Acts 2), but many of those who possess wealth are unwilling to act in this distributive sense; so they seek another so-called Christian doctrine that justifies their accumulation of goods, demonizing as "communism" those practices established by inclusive and distributive public policies. From this, one can understand the proliferation of neo-Pentecostal churches of prosperity theology: information that justifies unlimited individual accumulation as divine grace. With Bolsonarism (centered on coups d'état and the physical elimination of adversaries), a parallel Christianity crystallizes. 

Loyalty (faith, fides) is achieved through the establishment of a pact: to only get information from the Bolsonaro-supporting media sphere (WhatsApp, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Jovem Pan) of the far-right, a kind of political bible for these fundamentalist followers, discrediting all other sources of information, convinced by this toxic disinformation factory, through coordinated content, strategically produced to misinform and circulate the famous... fake news As Castro Rocha stated, “A person who is convinced of their beliefs is resistant to change; show them facts and statistics, and they will question your sources. If you add to this paranoid certainty the collective nature of the far-right media sphere, we have cognitive chaos becoming reality. This is what we are experiencing in Brazil today. This is the reason for Bolsonaro's two-minute speech: it made no sense to us, but it represented new information for his loyal followers.

Let's think about it. What to say about a man who married three times, exchanging his older wives for younger ones; who felt he had faltered when a girl was born instead of a boy; who was unable to visit a single hospital when grieving families lost 700 loved ones; who was unable to express solidarity in a gesture of compassion for the dead, nor for the arduous work carried out by public health professionals; who laughed and satanically imitated a person dying of asphyxiation from Covid-19? Yet, in the face of these real facts, millions of so-called Christians maintain the faith that this man will protect the Christian family that he himself failed to maintain or respect. This is just one example of the collective cognitive dissonance in motion developed by the Brazilian far-right.

Lula's election is just the beginning of a long and dark winter to be faced by each of us who yearn for a free, united, and happy Brazil.