On April 1st, colleague Leandro Narloch published an article full of rhetorical pranks to counter my text about a chocolate egg sold for R$5,950. It hurts to use this space to spread Narloch’s tricky logic, but it’s my name on the straight.
The title of the text, “Easter egg of R$ 5,950 makes the world a better place” paraphrases – voluntarily or not – a slogan of the Madero hamburger shop. Cross creed.
Moving from form to content, Narloch would have to be a fool to believe what he wrote. I’ve known the guy for 20 years, I’ve worked with him, we’ve had several beers together, I know he’s a very nice guy and not at all dizzy.
Narloch lost himself in character, as they say.
He bet his chips on picking up inconsistencies in the consensus on this or that issue –slavery, the Paraguayan War, whatever lightning strikes it–and wrapping them in a logical trap that undermines the majority view. With lukewarm arguments, but sufficiently well-structured to convince anti-system idiots and denialists alike.
It was a good bet. With the rise of the extreme right, Narlochian sophistry gave the author fame, money and a lot of self-confidence. Narloch considers himself the inventor of a politically incorrect tactic capable of turning the tide in any field, even in high-end confectionery.
The R$5,950 egg, sold by pastry chef Isabella Suplicy, is a metonymy of the luxury goods industry. Which Narloch defends as inclusive and distributing wealth, almost socialist.
To talk about chocolate, he puts a cell phone in the game.
The columnist claims that, in the early days, the cell phone was a luxury item and that showing it off was considered snobbish. I agree. Then he says that the first expensive devices financed an industry that became popular. I agree too.
But what does this have to do with Easter eggs?
Cell phones can be compared to personal computers, microwave ovens or artificial intelligence. With technologies that were already incipient and therefore very expensive.
Something quite different happened in the R$5,950 chocolate. A banal piece was taken to artificially inject value with brands, exclusivity and other abstract factors.
Narloch also says that luxury “is a way of convincing the rich to voluntarily deconcentrate their wealth.” Then he says that the money spent on very expensive things “strengthens a more qualified and remunerated production chain” than the industry of common things.
There’s more: “Anyone who cares about inequality should look kindly when millionaires pay R$200 for what ordinary people buy for R$20.” In a bolovo, perhaps. No: we’d better stick to chocolate.
Magic multiplication does not obey the same proportion for the farmer, the confectioner, the aunt who makes the package, the subject of social networks. These can make a few extra bucks, never ten times as much.
But someone takes the bulk of the R$180 surplus because, as Narloch himself says, the money doesn’t disappear. Money circulates among the rich, and only among them. It kind of does.
If Narloch thinks it’s cool to have chocolate for five minimum wages in a country where 24% of the population doesn’t have enough to eat, great. By inconsistency he does not sin.
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