Under the usual conditions of modern society, on schools and universities is incumbent the intellectual formation of citizens, on churches and activist groups their moral education, on counseling clinics and psychotherapy the integration of their personality. These three aspects may be separated in the academic curriculum and in the division of social labor, but not in the real existence of the individual. Every concrete problem of life poses cognitive, moral, and psychological difficulties at a time, requiring an integral and simultaneous response in all those three areas. Each human decision requires an integration of the knowledge acquired, of the values at stake, and of the psychological integration necessary to coordinate one thing with the other. In the academic world, which is an imitative scenery constructed for the sake of learning, these three elements may remain separate, precisely because decisions there do not have the definitive and irrevocable character of the acts of real life.
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My first general goal in life was to gain wisdom, to become an accomplished personality, a wakeful consciousness, and a source of strength, courage, and hope for the people around me. I studied philosophy and religion in search of living models of inner knowledge (and never of external stereotypes) that could guide me on the way to self-improvement. I found a lot of them: human excellence is not as rare as one might think. But I also encountered forces that opposed the attainment of my goals, forces which were extraordinarily resilient.
As an addition to my August 16 article, here are some other traits that define the revolutionary mentality:
1. A revolutionary does not understand injustice and evil as factors inherent in the human condition that can be attenuated but not eliminated, but rather as temporary anomalies created by a segment of humanity—the bourgeoisie, the Jews, Christians, etc.—which can be identified and punished, thereby extirpating the root of evil.2. The guilty segment of mankind spreads evil and sin by exercising a power—economic, political, military, and cultural. Hence, it must be eliminated by means of a superior power, the revolutionary power, deliberately created to achieve this purpose.
3. Evil power dominates society as a whole, molding it after the image and likeness of its own interests, ends, and purposes. The eradication of evil must therefore take on the form of a radical restructuring of the entire social order. Nothing can remain untouched. The revolutionary power, like the Biblical God, “makes all things new.” There are no limits to the range and depth of revolutionary action. It can reach even the victims of a previous situation of oppression by accusing them of having become so used to evil that they have become its accomplices, thus requiring purifying punishment to the same or greater extent than the old power elite.
4. Though brought about by a specific segment of the human race, evil has spread everywhere so thoroughly that it has become difficult to conceive of life without it. Therefore, the new society of order, justice, and peace can be imagined only in very broad outlines, so different will it be from everything that has existed thus far. Revolutionaries therefore have no obligation—not even the possibility—to explain in plain details the plan for the new society, let alone to prove its viability or demonstrate, in terms of cost vs. benefit, the advantages of the transformation. These are given as fundamental premises, so that the demand for proof is automatically impugned as a subterfuge for avoiding change and condemned ipso facto as an element to be eliminated. The revolution is its own foundation and cannot be questioned from the outside.
5. Though known only as a very general vague image, the future society puts itself above all human judgment and itself becomes the fundamental premise of all values, all judgment, all reasoning. An immediate consequence of this is that the future, which cannot be conceived of rationally, can be known only via its image in the current revolutionary action, which in its turn, for this very reason, removes itself from all human judgment, except from that of revolutionary leaders who incarnate and personify that action. But even these people may represent it imperfectly, by virtue of their being children of the old society and of their carrying within themselves, at least partially, the germs of the ancient evil. The prophetic and intellectual authority of revolutionary leaders is therefore provisional and only lasts as long as they have the material power to secure it. The capacity of leader of nations towards a beatific future is therefore uncertain and revocable, depending on the irregularities of the revolutionary pathway. The crimes and mistakes of a fallen leader, imputable to the future society, nor to the revolutionary process as such, nor to the revolutionary movement as a whole, can therefore only be explained as a residual effect of the condemned past: a revolutionary, by definition, sins only by not being sufficiently revolutionary.
Translated by Alessandro Cota.
Revised by Donald Hank.
Originally published in Diário do Comércio on October 10, 2007.
Many get scandalized by the political asylum granted to murderer Cesare Battisti, but few try to investigate what the episode really means. The succession of similar cases, the protection conceded by the Brazilian left to practically all international terrorists who dock here— Achille Lollo, Olivério Medina and his wife, the kidnappers of Abílio Diniz and Washington Olivetto—, and the contrast that those cases make with the refusal of asylum to two Cuban boxers should alert to the obviousness that those are not isolated cases, but a permanent, systematic activity. But even those that realize this hesitate to sound out the relationship between those facts and the general strategy of the Workers’ Party.
When Christ said that in truth we love what we ought to hate and hate what we ought to love, He taught in the most explicit manner that feelings are not trustworthy guides of human conduct: before we can use them as indicators of right and wrong, we have to teach them what is right and wrong. Feelings are valid only when subordinated to reason and spirit.
For anyone who wishes to orient himself in today’s politics—or simply to understand something of the last centuries’ history—nothing is more urgent than obtaining some clarity about the concept of “revolution.” A great confusion over it reigns both among the public opinion and in the sphere of academic studies, for the simple fact that the general idea of revolution is almost always formed on the basis of fortuitous analogies and blind empiricism, instead of searching the structural profound and permanent factors that define the revolutionary movement as an ongoing and overpowering reality over a period of at least three centuries.
Georges Gurdjieff, who was a false spiritual master but an authentic genius of sadistic humor, used to say that human intelligence was a material substance, which existed on Planet Earth in a definite amount: when one person gained more intelligence, it ran short for others. Plainly this theory is only valid as a joke, but in my moments of depression, I begin to believe in it a little: after all, as the experience of decades has shown me, in measure as I vanquished my natural ignorance, and acquired some understanding of the problems of metaphysics, theory of knowledge, and the logic of science, I concomitantly observed my contemporaries losing not only the capacity to make the most elementary distinctions, but also to perceive the unavoidable and direct consequences of the propositions in which they believed.