One Silva, businessman; one Souza, garbage collector: the dangers of the new Brazilian mentality.

The murder of garbage collector Laudemir de Souza Fernandes in Belo Horizonte by businessman Renê da Silva Nogueira Júnior has gained widespread attention. Not because such violence is rare in Brazil—quite the contrary. Class violence permeates all levels and spheres of social life. What makes this case unique is not the crime itself, but its semiotic and representational effect.

On one side, there is the figure of the precarious worker, poorly paid, invisible, and socially stigmatized for performing a job that, in the dominant ideology, serves as a negative example—the profession that embodies the destiny to be avoided by those who have lost hope, including in formal education. It is a profession permeated by racism and class prejudice. On the other side, there is the image of the successful businessman, the perfect embodiment of the contemporary Brazilian right. Not coincidentally, his features resemble the cover of the magazine. Veja From 2004, entitled "The Strength of the Right," a piece of a media project that, week after week, cultivated an irrational hatred of Lula and the PT, fueling anti-PT sentiment. On the cover, one sees a man with his back turned, dressed in a suit, whose right arm tears his own clothes with enormous force—a metaphor that fits almost perfectly the figure of the businessman-assassin.

But what do we learn from this outcome, if it is possible to abstract, even for a moment, from the pain of Laudemir's family, friends, and colleagues? The act itself seems to have been driven by a childish mentality, a comic book alter ego: a kind of frustrated superman, incapable of containing an immeasurable force.

We should not, however, dwell on the irretrievable past of the lost life, but rather understand the social and political program revealed in this crime. The zombie, here, functions as a metaphor: it is the utopia of ideology, its most faithful representation. The zombie does not think, it only reacts; it converts life into death and death into life; it is the figure of complete conformity.

The gravity of the crime lies not only in its obviousness—the racist barbarity that has permeated Brazilian history for five centuries. The true horror lies in its symbolic character, in its power as a sign of a country marked by the necropolitical experience of Bolsonarism. The businessman is not just an individual; he is the embodiment of a new social mentality. His act cannot be understood except in the light of a culture of hatred, of contempt for the worker, for Black people, and for the poor. Like a gym zombie, hypertrophied with protein, he acts like a body programmed to kill. This gesture reveals a collective formation: there are hundreds of other bodies and minds seething with the same hatred, fueled by the same broth of racism, sarcasm, mockery, indifference, and irresponsibility. This is the true precipice upon which democracy balances.

The common denominator of this emerging mentality is not merely the absence of empathy, but something more concrete: the failure of respect. Capitalism, by artificially leveling differences under the guise of formal equality, corrupts the very notion of respect. The false universality of "freedom of expression" is an example of this: inverted in its function, it has become an instrument for the corrosion of democracy. Thus, an open field is created where the logic of hatred flourishes and arms itself against Black people and the poor, street sweepers and domestic workers, women and trans people, people from the Northeast of Brazil and Indigenous people, illiterate people and people with disabilities. Respect becomes a class privilege. The employee must say, when serving coffee: "it's a pleasure to serve you"; the employer, on the contrary, feels absolved of any obligation to reciprocity.

A society structured on respect dispenses with empathy as a moral supplement. Respect is a fundamental, universal condition that precedes any feeling. Empathy, in isolation, risks degrading into bourgeois paternalism, into pious pity directed at the oppressed. The root of Laudemir's murder, therefore, lies not in a lack of sensitivity, but in the annihilation of the very notion of respect that should permeate all social relations.

In this context, social media has functioned as the privileged laboratory for this erosion. Respect, reduced to a moralistic vestige, has become an obsolete word, buried in the ideological graveyard of classic Hollywood. As Byung-Chul Han observes in In the Swarmalgorithmic logic dissolves the pathos Distance, a requirement of respect, is being replaced by the excessive proximity of constant scandal. The new mentality that emerges is therefore inseparable from the digital form: a mentality without distance, without silence, without restraint.

The murder committed at 9 a.m. on August 11, 2025, is not an isolated episode, but a synthesis of an ongoing historical project. The most shocking aspect was not just the crime itself, but the banal routine that followed: walking the dog, working out at the gym—the normalization of horror. This is not about individual psychopathy, but a collective program of subjectivation: the conversion of the citizen into a civilian soldier.

Classic dictatorships paraded tanks down the avenues; contemporary ones manipulate algorithms and manufacture mentalities. That's what it's all about: an invisible army in gestation, multiplied exponentially by digital networks, whose strength doesn't depend on explicit coercion, but on blind adherence to a logic of hatred. The crime in Belo Horizonte is just a sign, a trigger, a mirror. And what it shows us is not only the death of a man, but the birth of a mentality that, if not confronted, threatens to bury Brazilian democracy once and for all.