After all, is a new dictatorship the solution for Brazil?

Brazilian Democracy is in ICU

Brazilian democracy goes badly, and it is not speculation, it is an observation… Ok, I recognize that I am not a political scientist, nor historian, nor have formation in social sciences, but my analysis is the analysis of a citizen.

So... the solution is a new dictatorship, is not it? Putting in power someone who will “save the homeland”, put everything in the axes and, after it, hand over power to the people! Really???

Before of all, it should be clarified that when I talk about dictatorship I am not talking just about our post-1964 military regime, or its nostaligics. I am talking also about the other side of the coin, those who consider Cuba and Venezuela as examples to be followed, after all “tonight millions of children will sleep on the street, but none of them are Cuban” ¹… for those, is not important that even with a birth and death rate similar to Brazil, the US and Argentina, Cuba had a growth of only 59.5% in the population (from 7.141 million in 1960 to 11.390 million in 2016), while Brazil had a growth of 186.66% (from 72.49 million in 1960 to 207.8 million in 2017)… but wait… if Cuba has a birth rate similar than Brazil (1.62 and 1.79 respectively), while Brazil has a death rate of 6.08 p/m and Cuba 7,64 p/m (data from Wikipedia), how to explain so much discrepancy? This is simple to explain when you think that 11.177 million cubans live in the USA, fleeing the Cuban dictatorship; in fact, if we add the two populations (Cubans living in Cuba + Cubans living in the USA) we have 22.567 million people, or a growth of 316%. That is, it is very easy to maintain a more egalitarian economy when 49.5% of its population does not depend on its health infrastructure, habitation, economy, etc. I think if we expel the 102.861 million of Brazilians (that is, 49.5% of our population) to other country, we will have a balanced economy, a better health care system, our population will be better nourished, and we will have no children sleeping on the streets, but… is this what we want? That, of course, without to mention that even if you do not sleep on the street in Cuba, you do not have freedom of speech, freedom of belief, freedom to go, to come and to stay…

Left and right dictatorships: two sides of the same coin

In the other hand, we have those who say the solution is a new “constitutional military intervention”, in other words, put the military in power for a while, so that they organize the things in Brazil, and they would deliver the power back in 2018. I see, at least, three problems in this proposal.

The first is: what is the warranty that they will deliver the power back in 2018? Or in 2019? Or in 2050? Who has already read a bit about our history knows that the proposal when the military occupied the power in 1964 was to organize the country and to do elections in 1965... the result? Reluctantly and with much popular pressure they delivered the power in 1985, 19 years after they promised!

Second, who said that the corrupt are not also inside the barracks? In a fast search in Google it is easy to find high-ranking military officers involved in scandals with contractors, with fraudulent biddings, etc., in short, acting corruptly (I will not even mention the corruption that has run amok during the military dictatorship). But wait… Is not corruption a political thing? Yes, corruption is a thing of political, says the student that to cheat in the test and plagiarized, says the citizen who bypasses taxes, say the driver who bribes the guard the guard who accepts the bribe, says the doctor who receives twice for the same procedure (once from the client, another from Health Care System), and says the patient who goes to the doctor without being sick, in search of a certificate to lengthen the weekend, says the “bicheiro” (individual who registers and receives illegal bets) and the illegal gambling bettor, says the boss who withhold labor rights and says the worker who comes with absurd lawsuits, says the priest without faith who only wants the tithe and says the tithing who wants to buy a place in heaven; both I and you say it ignoring that corruption is endemic in our country (perhaps ignoring this does well to our conscience), that we breathe corruption, that we work corruptly, that we study corruptly, that we pray corruptly, that we love corruptly…

The last problematic point of a new dictatorship (whether it be left-wing or right-wing) is that we just learn and improve democracy living in a democracy. In fact, in all our republican history, we lived little moments of real democracy. We started our republican life with a military coup², we had an aristocracy ruling until 1930, a dictatorship until 1945, being that this dictator only really left the power with his death, in 1954, and ten years later we had a new dictatorship which lasted 20 years. Indeed, we bring the dictatorship inscribed even in our flag in its motto “Ordem e Progresso” (order and progress)³, motto taken from the citation of the ideologue of Positivism Auguste Comte: “Love for principle and Order for base, Progress for the end.” It is an allusion to “scientific” positivism (in quotes because Positivism is as scientific as Marxism, that is: it is not!³). In other words, our Republic was born under the rule of “scientific dictatorship”, and this has been haunting us for all 128 years of our republican history. We are still looking for someone who will lead us, who to take us by the hand like a wise father, commanding us and our country to the overall good; and we believe that we do not have responsibility about our own good, that each one of us do not have capacity of conduct our own country, having representative rulers just to manage and intermingling conflicting social forces as would be expected in a Democracy; we still believe in rulers to command as an emperor, to instruct the society which way it should or should not take, to say what we should or should not to watch, say, think, read, write, like, which religion to follow (or not to follow)…

Education is the solution, but not ideological education

However, how to change it? How to improve our democracy? I see no other way out than citizen education. Nevertheless, citizen education can not be what is been done at our schools, with that concept that “Portuguese, Math, Science, History… are not important; the important thing is the student to worry about what I care about, using the same, using the same political vision I have.” I think we need an education with content, and that such content must be well taught and required in tests. I do not think it is sincerely possible to be a full citizen if you can not read and understand correctly in your own language; I do not think it is possible to be a full citizen if you can not understand Math enough to know how much an increase in a tax or investment in some area will result; I do not think it is possible to be a full citizen if you do not know what means greenhouse effect, bacterial evolution, GMO, chemicals and their basic interactions, and mainly how science came to this, how the scientific method works; I do not think it is possible to be a full citizen if you do not know the history of your own country and its interaction with wold’s history; I do not think it is possible to be a full citizen if you do not understand basically your own homeland, its people, its geography, its political system, its political regime, its form of government, without knowing how the laws are made, what is a bicameral or unicameral system, what are the attributions of the Executive, Legislative and Judiciary in each public sphere… and we are learning nothing of that in our schools!

The cure for our Democracy is ... Democracy!

Summarizing, Brazilian democracy goes badly, and it is not speculation, it is an observation. How to solve this? With a left-wing or right-wing dictatorship? I think not, but with the deepening of democracy, with greater conscious popular participation (without ideological rancor, but aware of what you are advocating and why you are defending it), and with non-dogmatic education (neither left-wing, nor right-wing). Concluding, the medicine to our sick Democracy is… more Democracy! At least I think so, and I am not a political scientist, nor a historian, nor have formation in social sciences, but I consider myself as a full citizen who believes in democracy and thinks Brazil can be improved.

You may say I'm a dreamer

But I'm not the only one

I hope some day you'll join us

And the world will be as one⁴

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1 – Sentence attributed to Fidel Castro, and affixed on a sign at the exit of Havana.

2 – To know more about this episode, I recommend: Freyre, Gilberto. Order and Progress: Brazil from Monarchy to Republic. Berkeley: University of Californa Press, 1986.

3 – We can not consider either (positivism and Marxism) as Science because neither of them is falsifiable, in other words, you can not imagine an experiment to prove that they are wrong if they are. To know more read: Popper, Karl. The Logic of Scientific Discovery.  Eastford: Martino Fine Books, 2014.

4 – Excerpt from Imagine, by John Lennon.