A head in trouble

There are wise, brilliant, wonderful, captivating, and unique thoughts and ideas. They are manifestations that simply enchant humanity, dazzling with their logic, poetry, or reason.

There are others that are 'common'. And then there are those that are 'just' wrong and disastrous. Defective, inverted, resulting not from intelligence, but from its ontological opposite.

One of the errors in a thought process occurs when a certain objective logic, reason, or principle of a given activity, profession, or science is violated. Philosophy produces 'thoughts' that apply differently to various areas.

Thus, in History there is historical thought. In Physics, physical thought. In Biology, biological thought. In Law, legal thought.

Historical thought will never authorize, as a method of investigation, the chronological inversion of facts. Physical thought will never accept the denial of mechanics. Biological thought will never reject evolution. Current democratic legal thought will never admit any aggression against the dignity of the human person.

From this, one can see universal, rational, and logical principles that impose upon anyone who intends to 'learn' one of these sciences the need to consider them, under penalty of formulating a flawed thought. These and other principles end up being non-negotiable.

There are no ideologies or preferred political sides in the principles of science. They all follow a slow and gradual methodological evolution throughout the history of each area, which ended up being confirmed, some with great difficulty.

One of the most spectacular examples is Evolution. Ernst Mayr, in several of his world-famous biology books, shows that Evolution – for the world's leading biologists – has ceased to be a 'theory' and has become a fact, after resisting 90 years of criticism from Biology as a whole, starting in 1858, after Darwin. It matters little if some politician or other intellectually dishonest or uneducated person 'wants' Evolution to remain a theory, insisting on the mystical and supernatural side of some 'creationism'.

When methods from Philosophy in general, and more specifically from the Philosophy of Science and Logic, are 'applied' to the current issue of the Pandemic in this obscurantist political Brazil of 2020, one sees, through social media, a series of lobotomized ideas from radicals and fanatics, simply violating principles that render them technically useless.

It should also be noted that this critical situation is not, historically, exclusive to the right or the left in isolation. The so-called "petralhas" and "bolsominions," due to their well-known mental block in exercising any self-criticism through their own intelligence, demonstrate the same level of intellectual difficulty. Fanaticism throughout history has always claimed victims, never saved them.

A critical example of this flawed way of thinking is the specific case of the 'preference' for deaths expressed by the President of the Republic, who, it is clear, should have better advisors. Much better.

Note the pseudological arguments made: first: 'Are people dying? Yes! I'm sorry! But many more will die if the economy continues to be destroyed.' Second: 'An appeal I make to the governors. I am ready to talk. Shall we preserve life? Yes. But, in this way, the price later on will be hundreds more lives that we will lose because of these absurd measures to shut everything down.'

Because of them, the president even started saying that he regrets the death effect. That's an improvement. However, he 'chooses' which death he is more concerned about, when he explicitly states 'regret' the deaths from Covid-19, and uses the adversative conjunction 'but' for the deaths that the economy, however, may produce.

In the second sentence, it uses the same 'logic' of bureaucratizing Covid-19 deaths and emphasizes, through the same adversative conjunction 'but', the deaths – 'hundreds' – that the economy may cause.

The fact is that this 'economy,' referred to by the president, of reopening factories and businesses, has not caused a single death so far. What is killing thousands on an upward curve and is now in the lap of Brazilians is the Coronavirus. In other words, the Coronavirus is a present, growing, and already deadly reality, while this economy referred to, in terms of death, remains mere speculation.

There is a disastrous, unfortunate, and irrational temporal 'hierarchy' there, totally flawed on a logical-social level. This would be a mistake for any world leader who opted for this absurd logic: preferring to worry about 'hundreds' of supposed deaths that the commercial economy 'might' cause, to the detriment of the thousands of current and real deaths that are already victimizing the country.

And note that this isn't even a quantitative comparison: thousands of Covid-19 deaths versus the president's aforementioned 'hundreds' of economic deaths. In death, one doesn't compare quantities or qualities. The emergency response is focused on today's deaths, whatever they may be, seeking to avoid them at all costs. The pandemic is a reality that is killing people today.

This flaw in reasoning alone exposes the presidential thinking to rational, or methodological, error. As of yesterday, May 14, 2020, Brazil has experienced the tragic death toll of 14.058.

A correct political-legal-philosophical thought, linked to universal principles of human dignity and the prevalence of life at any cost, cannot tolerate the relativization of current death from Covid-19 to the detriment of a supposed future death stemming from the economy.

All worldviews from international science agencies, medical centers, governments, universities, and global entities are contested in their concern about the death toll from the pandemic. No ifs, ands, or buts.

This would be the same as a hospital director refusing to treat patients with a certain disease that is already killing people, so as not to occupy beds, in order to wait for another disease that has been 'announced' and that will kill in a different way in the future. This director would be criminally prosecuted and his medical career would be exemplarily ruined if he used this insane 'logic'.

Sometimes, the issues of thought are complex and 'boring', difficult even for a public manager with little education and background. The great thinker Edgar Morin, in his work Introduction to Complex Thought, p. 15, shows how the old pathology of thought, linked to myths and gods it created, has been updated in 5 versions, with the modern pathology of the mind being linked to 'hypersimplification that prevents one from seeing the complexity of reality'.

The reality of the thousands of deaths from Covid-19 shouldn't be so difficult for the president to see. But a troubled mind doesn't produce humanistic understandings. Much less methodological ones.

PS. Teich, the health minister, has just resigned. Another one the president is 'fighting' with.