Opinion – Vinicius Torres Freire: Brazil’s new policy of noisy religion and quiet hunger

People have forgotten to give importance to serious transformations that happen right in front of the stools, which change the social and political air that one breathes.

It is not just about the normalization of horrors under Jair Bolsonaro: coup, torture, dictatorship, ignorance and hatred of human diversity, for example. It goes beyond pocketbookism, which was a vehicle or catalyst for change, but it is smaller than these torrents.

Religion once again became a matter of State, officially, with the appointment and approval of André Mendonça for a seat in the Supreme Court, for example.

Yes, we already had official or unofficial belief. The Catholic Church, often reactionary and monopolistic, had enormous weight in politics and society. You forgot about this perhaps because there was a vacuum of religious policy. It was imagined then that the country was evolving towards civilized secularism, of freedom for all beliefs, which would be a private matter, if not an intimate one. This lapse occurred between the beginning of the decay of the influence of Catholicism, from the end of the 1960s, and the political-economic strengthening of what is now generically called “evangelicals”, in the beginning of the 1990s. It was a lapse in the sense of time and mistake.

The great-grandparents of political science said that when a social group, generally emerging, considers itself underrepresented or powerful, it abandons the coalition in which it was sheltered and creates a new party, in the broadest sense of the term. This is the case of the “evangelicals”, but also of agroland or the backlands or the re-emerging military.

The year 2022 will be the ninth year of per capita income (GDP) lower than at the peak of 2013. With great competence and luck, we will only return to that level in 2026. It would, moreover, be a mere recovery of lost ground: what does not enter into this account we stopped growing in this period. The generation that became adults in 2014, which was then 21 years old, will reach thirty without ever having seen the country grow.

Even more impressive, the Great Stagnation, made worse by other crises, did not provoke the emergence of any major social or political movements of the underprivileged, nor even a riot of protest. Hunger is quiet in the country of noisy religion or the noise of the bullshit of ignorant sectarianism, of the great rise of the idiot.

We also do not notice that some socioeconomic relations have undergone profound changes, which in many countries would lead to conflict. The labor law was gutted and new protections were not transplanted (on the contrary, informality eats what is left of the bowels). The pension law underwent a major change (it doesn’t matter if “it doesn’t solve the fiscal problem”, that’s another matter here). The State continued to be large and regulate the economy of market favors, but it lacks a democratic State.

The chronic economic crisis, the structural change in work and the lack of social and political debate on the economic destiny are causing the country to be divided into a mass of commoners who want to deliver no more than a ration of bread (minimum incomes ) and an elite restricted to an enclave that lives off rents or the work that will remain.

This country in which development is no longer talked about (or in which such a process has become unfeasible) is at risk of becoming a modern post-apocalypse pop caricature with traces of ancient despotism, bread, some circus and no work, with regions feudalized by money dukes and faction militias, in what’s left of the fire or drought of climate disaster, perhaps under a theocratized policy.

We descended little by little to these destinations, unnoticed.