Murilo Oliveira
Brazil, September 19, 2021.
We currently need to read some essential standards in our political, educational, and digital culture. I will even start with the politicians, who today harbor in Brazil a curious dichotomy in the current government and are present as an important component, if not the biggest one, in the inflation rates, which is the price of fuel. The current government has two types of supporters, two patterns, which contradict each other. That is, the first is the privatizing liberal, the second is the nationalist military, even though these definitions are pleonasms, with no solution between these two patterns of supporters, we suffer from high fuel prices. This means that, in the privatizing liberal pattern, we take processes from Petrobras shareholders in New York to practice market prices, this means that if a barrel of oil costs a hundred “$” in the international market, not even if it costs five “$” to be produced by Petrobrás, it will be sold to you at 100 “$”, when in reality there is great pressure from this group to sell Petrobrás as a whole, which in practice results in this, the company will always practice market prices despite the inferior costs* of production, and sell to the domestic market. The government will harbor these two standards of supporters, those who want to sell it, or at least buy part of it with stratospheric profits, and the nationalist sectors, which is a military standard, which sees the company as a jewel in the crown, extremely strategic, that no one with similar conscience would sell, on the contrary, everyone wants to buy.
From here we go to another pattern of the most curious that plague the country, this one did a happy 7th of September. Public financing of election campaigns, there is a general feeling here that it is absurd for politicians to campaign with our money, the standard is that the shouting is immense about it. But it is a novelty that almost bury Brazilian democracy, because politicians have always been elected with money from the interests they defend. I don’t know if it’s clear, but there is a pattern of behavior of every voter finding public campaign funding a complete nonsense, and a pattern of behavior of many powerful economic interests buying politicians even before they are elected, and the resulting distrust whether Brazil should reach the next election with these higher civilizing standards.
Now let’s go to the third patterns being discussed in the square. Nowadays nobody, absolutely nobody, who is unhappy with the state of things, and has a little more intellectual density, elects a determined villain, whether political from the left or from the right, without formulating the problem within a pattern of expression of problems that do not include the words “bubble” or even “algorithm”. It is a pattern, and not an isolated revolt or a lonely feeling, that the problems of today are associated with the means by which we carry out our expression and reading of reality. And in this it is worth some observations, such as, sociology, and the social sciences, rather than computer science, is a vast area of knowledge, of great accumulation, and useful for these media and their moderators, and I said, Durkheim’s sociology for example, it comes to our rescue to say that the person who manifests himself, like someone who comments and posts in these networks, is, in the definition of the term, a reactionary, a disgruntled conservative, like someone who lynches a criminal in the street. This in itself causes the sampling in general to be biased, the sample we obtain is always tending to the same and not to the group of people. For example, when a great actress puts a photo on Instagram, the show tends to have a huge number of people calling her fat, to give a preposterous example, but that’s what happens in political terms. People don’t come to praise, but to complain. That said, in these third-class patterns, which emerge as a priority of political discourse, we have, above all, to deal with a fact that, in my particular view, makes them extremely harmful at times, when making the option for a much more old generation and illiterate. Jefferson Airplane in his famous song Volunteers would say: “one generation got old, one generation got soul”.
Finally, we have to consider here that in the United States’ conflagration with China, where Europe does not know very well how to position itself, if it assumes this as a conflict and takes a side or not, the fact is that behavior patterns like cold war reappear as an attempt to simplify things, a kind of US foreign policy for export “for dummies”. And this, for example, recalls the classic of the “little teachers”, who doesn’t know what the “little teachers” are? Paulo Maluf, when he flattened their salaries, said that they were poorly married, the state’s primary teachers, who, as it turns out, only had good remuneration in São Paulo during the time of governor Franco Montoro. Where, time and time again, they were immensely more respected as every teacher in the country should be, they lived with better salaries and in a bipolar world torn apart by the cold war. Where far from being until today a contingent of civil servants with little influence, given their large number and their role as opinion makers, they were taught to reject that side of the world opposite to which they lived. And that included the nascent pedagogy of Paulo Freire. Where practice would demonstrate that each thing should have its place in history, wise men who have always been the “little teachers” quickly realized that children’s literacy through the provision of an elementary tool with which words were composed proved effective for all life. The so-called “Smooth Way” primers. Which in no way rejects something that Paulo Freire will observe and point out, which I call pattern reading, or global reading. This educator who generated a conservative pattern of criticism on the other side of the battlefront among broad groups now of advanced age, realized that those who at 50 years of age could not read and write actually had a “pattern reading” of reality so constant and vast, to survive without knowing how to read and write formally, that it could be literate in another way. In other words, being illiterate at age 50 meant that you take a bus without knowing how to read, just as you know your bus is blue, it comes from that street, around the time that red shop is closing. And this will always represent an important analysis for education studies, even though children prefer to learn that the vowel “A” can form a syllable with all the consonants.
So, to summarize all this, I would say that we have to read many conflicting patterns to understand that, possibly an authoritarian right-wing discourse leads us to a Venezuelan dictatorship, that the limit of the erosion of Brazilian democracy may be the door to entry to some level of improvement, that technology that seems to be a privilege and a total domain of the youngest today serves an old generation, very old, that at the limit has explanations to fill holes, that screams completely silly things, and has been privileged in the extreme for these young billionaires who are not surprising for being conservative, nor for having their samples compromised, but need to make a strategic choice for the new, for the young, for the complexity, for the good explanations that cover the accumulated of Social Sciences, with a “S” and capital “S”, which differs profoundly from Computer Science, but help the latter in the governance of their own companies and in global governance bal in incredible shape. It is perhaps from the marriage of old and new patterns that one will find the way out of seemingly insoluble questions. Patterns of accumulated knowledge, with new patterns of behavior.
@CoexistenceLaw
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