The End and the Beginning

“When I was young,” a grandmother says, “life was much simpler.” How many grandmothers have offered the same lament? In the words of Charles Dickens: “It was the worst of times.”

These days, for those of us living in Brazil, this rings true. Social critics and economists, Brazilian and foreign, are declaring the country a disaster, caught in a perfect storm – political upheaval infused with economic instability.

In 2016, high unemployment entered the Brazilian daily diet along with a second year of negative GDP growth. Added to the two-year recession is inflation, a full five points higher than the government's goal. The country is hosting the first-ever Olympics in South America led by an acting president.

Meanwhile, federal prosecutors are buried in the largest corruption investigation in Brazil's history – Lava Jato. Everyone from politicians to corporate CEOs is getting ensnared and the scandals show no signs of abating thanks to the introduction of the plea bargain into the legal system. “They're singing like canaries,” as they used to say in the comics. Not a week goes by without new arrests in the corruption investigations. There have been so many arrests that critics have begun to ask if the judiciary has overstepped its bounds. In a country where 75 percent of murders go unsolved, hearing people say the judiciary may be too strong is alarming. It's easy to believe the lamenting grandmothers.

Is the world spinning out of control? Is it the end of democracy? What's happening in Brazil is cataclysmic. However, let's be clear this perfect storm is not unique to Brazil nor to this century. It's true life was less complicated in the past. There was less stress and fewer decisions to make. On the other hand, grandmothers have been making the same pronouncements for generations. Viewed through the prism of nostalgia, the past always looks better.

Certainly, the scandals uncovered in Lava Jato are horrendous and unprecedented in scale, which is saying a lot in Brazil. Malfeasance has been endemic throughout Brazil’s history and Latin America’s. Brazil’s battles with nepotism, kleptocracy, and impunity go back to colonial times. Monarchies, after all, are not known for their equitable systems of justice.

Herein lies the crux of the issue – Brazil is a new democracy. As the 19th century British political philosopher J.S. Mill pointed out, while democracy isn't perfect, it's far more egalitarian than monarchy. Democracy is the most complex system of government. Today, thanks to the power given to federal judges, Brazil is taking its first steps toward ending its legacy of impunity for the wealthy.

During the 18th, 19th, and into the 20th century, wealthy landowners in Brazil were known as coronels. They were not military men, but were addressed by friends and foes as coronel. They controlled huge tracts of land for their own economic benefit, establishing a tradition of capitalist domination of land use and exploitation of workers. The royal impunity of Brazil’s emperors was inherited by the coronels, such as Coronel Schmidt (1850-1924), a German immigrant who became known as the “King of Coffee.”

While the coronels may be gone today, the arrogance of impunity is still at play. In a well-known incident a few years ago, Luciana Tamburini, an inspector who worked for the transit department in Rio de Janeiro, was working at a roadblock on a Saturday night screening for drunk drivers. João Carlos de Souza Correa pulled up to the roadblock where Luciana was working. He didn’t appear to be drunk, but he was driving without a license, registration, or license plates. When Luciana tried to ticket him for these infractions, he replied with the language of coronels: “Voce sabe com quem está falando?” (Do you know whom you’re talking to?)

Unlike Souza, most of us would regret our dilemma, apologize to Luciana for the missing documentation, accept the meager ticket, and drive away. Instead, Souza went into a rage, announcing that he was a judge. Luciana replied: “You may be a judge, but you’re not God.” Judge Souza demanded Luciana be arrested on the spot for her arrogance. When her fellow transit officers refused to obey Souza’s demand for Luciana's arrest, he got on the phone and called his friends in the police department. Luciana was handcuffed and arrested at the roadblock. When she later appeared in court on the charges, the presiding judge found her guilty of “insulting the dignity of a judge” and fined her the equivalent of three months’ salary. On appeal, Luciana lost.

Brazil is a class-conscious culture where apartment buildings have separate elevators labeled “social” and “service” – one for the residents and the other for maids and workers. Impunity extends to federal congressmen, who cannot be tried in the usual courts, but only before the Supreme Court. They also enjoy job perks that include free housing in Brasília and unlimited air travel expenses, which elevates their compensation packages to beyond that of Washington’s congressmen.

While it's easy to disdain coronels and their macho arrogance, it's historically naïve to do so. A glance at US history reveals similar arrogance. At the dawn of the 20th century, America's captains of industry, men like Henry Ford, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt operated like coronels. Their political influence and exploitation of workers were comparable to the corruption in Brazil. It takes time to build a democracy, and the rich/powerful men who control an empire do not surrender their power willingly. What happened in the US a hundred years ago is what is happening in Brazil today – democratic principles are engaged in a desperate battle to triumph over oligarchy and defeat the culture of impunity.

It's worth noting that while we all experience nostalgia, not just our grandmothers, the “good old days” included outhouses, barbers who were also dentists and pulled teeth without anesthesia, and the macho coronels. Sadly, we don't need to look far to find vestiges of the old coronels. American author Alex Cuadros has published a book about Brazil entitled Brazillionaires: Wealth, Power, Decadence, and Hope in an American Country. Cuadros draws a parallel between Brazil's billionaires today and the 19th century robber barons in the US, which is why he chose to put “American Country” in his title. Cuadros labels Brazil's billionaires as today's coronels, and he illustrates that in the US and the rest of the Western world, billionaires hold extraordinary power with no accountability. A case in point: Cuadros still hasn't found a Brazilian publisher for his book to be translated into Portuguese. There's not one publisher in Brazil willing to print negative statements about the country's billionaires.

In an interview with Glen Greenwald, Cuadros stated: “Many Brazilians have this self-flagellating impulse to imagine their country as irredeemably corrupt. And it’s true that corruption is part of the culture here, going back to colonial days. But if you look at the 19th century US, our robber barons made and maintained their fortunes in ways that would be very familiar to a Brazilian today. Corruption was endemic; bribing officials was very normal, and legislators often took it upon themselves to blackmail businessmen.”

The idea of a Brazilian national inferiority complex was first presented by Brazilian playwright Nelson Rodrigues, who called it the complexo de vira-lata, or stray dog complex. Rodrigues coined the term after the 1950 World Cup, which was held in Brazil and ended in the country’s devastating loss to Uruguay in the finals. Rodrigues wrote that this complex is “the inferiority in which Brazilians voluntarily place themselves in front of the rest of the world.”

II.

There have been several periods in human history when the world convulsed, when mass change descended on a country or civilization without warning, forcing people to alter their lives, such as the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. Today we are in the midst of another, the Technology or Information Age. Rapid changes are occurring in the way we communicate and the way we work. The Technology Age, only a few decades old, has initiated a shift away from manufacturing jobs to service-oriented economies. Urban populations are continuing to grow but instead of factories, people work in offices. The manufacturing tasks are being automated by robots who don't get tired or paid overtime. There is an explosion of available information thanks to the internet, which is being democratically disseminated, and it is altering our world and ourselves as much as the Renaissance did.

While new technology and information may be exciting, it can also be frightening, especially for grandmothers who are less capable of adapting to rapid changes. When a new age dawns, the old ways disappear. New ideas and new inventions that force people to change their daily habits, like learning to use a different kind of phone, are not easy to accept. To enter a new era, something must be lost, and that's cause for nostalgia, or worse.

Like the rest of the world, Brazil is in the midst of a convulsion heralded by the information revolution. Added to this cultural transformation, there is political and economic turmoil. This combination has created a perfect storm, a witches brew stirring social unrest. While social unrest is frightening and can be dangerous if it turns violent, it is a logical response in times of massive transition. Where there is uncertainty about the future and unemployment, there will be social unrest. Youth unemployment is the worst in the Arab countries. Economic upheaval creates fear. In the US, the uncertainty and chaos has spawned the rhetoric of Donald Trump, who capitalizes on this fear.

We are in the midst of a new era, another social revolution, a cultural transmutation. The dilemma lies in which direction people will turn during this transitional era. When there are enormous changes in rapid succession, societies erupt, and in fear people look for simple answers to complex problems. People adapt to change, but are less able and willing to do so when it's forced upon them rapidly.

During these transformational times in history filled with the uncertainty of social unrest, people overreact. Economic and political instability add fuel to the fire, and people and governments overcompensate. If people are convinced they are living in the worst possible age, their anger and frustration can lead to demands for firmer, militaristic control of society by the State.

Transformations of entire cultures are by definition unstable, so the response is to seek stability by whatever means necessary. This is what happened during the Industrial Revolution in the US when there was economic instability at the end of the 1800s. It also happened in Western Europe in the 1930s in reaction to recession and hyperinflation, which lead to the rise of fascism in Italy, Germany, and Spain. The political power of evangelicals in Brazil today is an example of the fear of instability as is the Tea Party in the US.

Brazil is poised on a precipice. It may continue along the route of redefining and re-imagining itself as a living democracy, or it can overreact and fall prey to the easy answers and desperate motives of fascism, like 1930s Europe. The key is to stay calm and think clearly. People must recognize that we are living through revolutionary times, far more challenging than normal, and realize that we can't be in a hurry to solve the problems.

Unusual times call for unusual patience. Defeating impunity and corruption is a huge task. The fear and unrest and confusion we feel are natural responses to the growing pains associated with a young democracy like Brazil's, which is attempting to find its way in the midst of a new era, an information revolution as powerful as Gutenberg's. We are living both at the end of an era and at the beginning.