The era of inversions

Inequalities between people, nations and opportunities are increasingly glaring. The industrial system – basis from Modern era – faces one of its biggest crises; unemployment reaches levels rarely seen in the industrial era, and even in places where it remains stable or declining, the deterioration in the quality of employment is marked (are the well-known Mac job’s, an allusion to the jobs offered by the McDonald’s chain).

Time seems to run so fast that the new millennium is approaching so quickly that we don't have time to prepare for its arrival., we just wait for it. Course corrections come down to makeup – more than corrections, mere disguise.

Future generations may be ashamed of us. "Por qual motivo nossos avós deixaram as coisas chegarem a este estado? Did they not realize what was happening??", you might ask. We may even be alive when they ask these questions, but our passions will long be dead.

If they have better eyes than us, and sensitivity better than ours, summer, behind all this fabulous and, we even dare to say, sensational technological development, a big setback.

They will use powerful calculators that work by voice command to add up the number of lives that were destroyed in the American and French Revolutions (entre tantas outras que não tiveram a mesma sorte de serem contempladas com a medalha de "fato histórico"). These lives, used to justify and feed a new world project.

Ironically or jokingly, these revolutions, that brought so much to man, demonstrated themselves, as a matter of fact, a big Pandora's Box, but somewhat modified. Inside he carried, not the power of hope, but rather the power of inversion.

More lives continued to be sacrificed so that men could be seen in their collective singularity. Men were understood as equals, but irreplaceable. In order to ensure, among other things, the protection and promotion of the individual, the State found itself strengthened. Generations came (concomitants, according to some) de direitos "humanos", with multiple approaches, embracing the political, o social, economic and cultural.
Groups that ignore political boundaries have emerged to help realize these rights, in the same way groups emerged that ignore classes, that ignore color, ignore religions, sex. Such groups, as well as individuals or even society as a whole, can, as far as possible, identify who they are fighting against, with whom they fight and with whom they have no direct relationship.

This is the realization of the human rights that we now experience. No d & uacute; life, It is a very positive action and worthy of all the efforts we have. Even so, We fear that future generations will look upon it with a certain disdain, as a palliative measure. Maybe at this point we should censor ourselves, we wouldn't do it, just as we would not censor the next generations. This is a palliative measure.

When we look for the agent of the action, and not the cause of it, is not the core of the issue being worked on, are its consequences. We reiterate that its consequences must receive attention and appropriate treatment, but we cannot have 100% of the forces directed towards the treatment of these consequences, after all, Not just painkillers can cure a patient!
Some of that strength must be directed toward this central cause. We must ask ourselves: why did the state become so strong? Why technology is so important? Why the political arena is so important?

We would tend to answer these questions with a simple sentence: because man is important. But we cannot, unless we want to resort to self-hypocrisy or total ignorance of what surrounds and fills us.

Returning to future generations, It is precisely at this point that we can feel ashamed for living now. We are living in a time when everything is reversed, all means became ends and the end became the place. However this is not clear, sour/allowing our entire social organization (which we can understand as an eternal process in constant mutation) is based on absurdities.

How can we face it head on, with eyes raised, those who were not born because their ancestors died to fuel the fires of revolutions for a better world?
Even if indirectly, we are fighting for the sedimentation of this inverted world, that ignores those who fought for change, that ignores our advances allowing us to regress. Should our grandchildren use a diary already filled with 1820, obeying her?! Probably yes, because the world we leave them must come closer to that (or would it be like this?).
Entire countries are being reformed, rights are being destroyed, lives are being ignored; all this so that external debts can be paid. The State's function of redistributing wealth was also reversed, she takes everyone's money, including those who have practically no, to remit everything to banks and institutions that already have countless amounts of capital.

The expansion and deepening of capitalism, which should promote an improvement in people's living conditions also seem to be inverted, after all, We cannot confuse the number of televisions per inhabitant with a general improvement in quality of life. Not to mention the complicated situation in much of Africa and the small pieces of the African continent that seem to be spread out in every city in the world., under overpasses, on hills and in the streets surrounding our beautiful cars with pearlescent paint.

Health is no longer something responsible for a person's well-being, but rather a question of quality of labor. You can see in small newspaper notes the dismantling of health systems. Public hospitals that still remain open, are limited to large outpatient clinics designed to maintain – to some extent – living people. The same with education and culture, and public schools lose any educational meaning, focusing merely on training people for an uncertain job market, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Everything is being reversed.
What was very carefully and slowly being coined by citizens, is now being mutilated. A part of this mutilation that, in a sarcastic way, can be called consumers, are those who were kept within the system, are those who have guaranteed rights not to be able to remain a citizen, but to remain a consumer.
And another part of what was called citizen now no specific denomination (not even that!) receive. They are those outside the system; They are the ones who have nothing to lose because they never had the opportunity to fight for something. When they are given the opportunity to fight for their lives.
Both these, as consumers, are being stripped of their human quality. And this process of dispossession is carried out by the State, for society and for each one of us. And we can only change this situation if we work on the cause that, reiterating, is the reversal of ends, means and places. Otherwise, How can we reasonably defend and maintain that man is an end in himself??

If all those means that served the development of human beings today are understood as ends, and what's worse, without a critical questioning of this reality that opaquely stands in front of us, how to make it compatible with the idea of ​​man as an end?
This is a choice that inevitably excludes other alternatives.. I don't think it's up to me to decide which one should prevail., even though I believe in man as an end in himself. Even so, if the choice is not clearly stated, we will run the risk of promoting the choice we do not want.

Modern society
We survive in a world of colorful images that fill city streets and televisions. The dirt of the street mixes with the glamor of the shop windows. Beggars walk hand in hand with executives, both beggars.

This is the world we dream of changing. But this isn't the real world, is just one of its facets, perhaps the most colorful. Life in megalopolises swallows everything, even the criticism. The whole world is distorted and wears the image of the big city, living kingdom of insoluble paradoxes.

Even art stops presenting itself as criticism, now presents itself as the criticism. Beauty and ugliness have been replaced by shocking, but shock who? Maybe the big city cells.

Time is counted in precious seconds. The space beyond becomes the backyard, the least important even if constituent. Everything we don't know becomes the yard. E, It seems, we are now becoming the backyard of ourselves.
People start to act like uncontrolled vectors, looking to go in your illogical direction, ignoring that the sum of the vectors is, thus, minimized. Given this situation, the unions (are class, are of interest) become increasingly fluid and, sometimes, diffuse. Even so, cries for help seek to break the logic of a society in shock that prefers to admire neon lights.

A way out
One of the main “screams” is human rights. Such a cry is important not because it is superior to any other, but for highlighting a series of issues that concern the quality of life of a large portion of the world's population.

During most of the formation of the “society” Judeo-Christian Western, one of the main focuses of social organization was the formulation of duties. In the 19th and, mainly, in the 20th this focus changed to the idea of ​​rights. Recent declarations of men's rights encompass both traditional individual rights (all linked to freedoms) regarding social rights (linked to powers).

This change poses a problem: how to make laws for a society, based on it, when it is extremely unfair?

We can promote official regulation of the status quo, transforming this injustice into something at least legal. However, if we understand law not as something closed in itself, not as a set of settled and ordered norms, rather as a project for social change, the answer to this question would change in nature.

The separation of powers, proclaimed by Montesquieu, allowed enormous progress towards the promotion of a fairer society. Even so, It is necessary not to confuse the separation of powers with the total inarticulation between them. The three powers are based not only on the being of society, as well as it should not be.

In this sense, if we understand politics as the science of people's government, não podemos deixar nossas reflexões teóricas do funcionamento da sociedade ignorarem o papel ativo tanto do governar quanto do direito. Direito e política não podem ser separados.

É certo afirmar que o direito não é um agente de mudança social. Only man is. However, law is an important element in promoting change. This can be seen with article 5º of the Brazilian Federal Constitution: despite all the clauses that ensure a certain society, we live in another, very different. Or let's take article 6º which declares security as a social right, while 100 thousand people die violently every year in Brazil. We must remember that the ineffectiveness of the law permeates the entire legal system, characterizing, more than a legal problem, a political problem.

We can see a positive role of the Constitution even in norms that have not been properly regulated, since its existence prevents the creation of contrary norms, under penalty of being unconstitutional.

Both the injunction mandate (art. 5º, cut 71), as well as unconstitutionality, they seek to ensure compliance with constitutional norms in the face of the omission of the legislative power. With this we realize that there are active norms, that depend on agents of change in order to promote real effects, that is, the problem of ineffectiveness lies in the political-social will and not exactly in problems inherent to the norms.

With that in mind, we can analyze the Brazilian legal-social organization from a new perspective. Today there is a tendency to point out economic rights as more important to protect, even because his other rights would come.

We believe that the rights to education, the health, to work, at leisure, the security, to social security, protection of maternity and childhood (art. 6º) are more costly than the right to property (art. 5º). The problem is that we usually identify this first group of rights with an active stance by the State, while in the latter, we identified a near-absence of the State; it would be something very close to the “invisible hand” smithiana who would regulate this.

If what we have just presented is true, So why do we agree to continue paying taxes that go towards maintaining the police?, of the prison system, the costly bureaucracy of the public ministry, from the judiciary, among many others?
We cannot deny that rights have different costs, However, assuming that they have no costs is a fallacy. When we take into account that the costs of ensuring such rights are redistributed across the population (through taxes and morally), We can conclude that their implementation will depend on society's willingness to enforce them. To what extent is society willing to pay and, mainly, which rights will be privileged?
The question of the privilege of some rights, more than show, to some extent, the ideological profile of Brazilian society, shows the absurdity on which many. To privilege one norm over another is to mischaracterize the entire legal logic. (unless we choose the one that most benefits the individual, which is not the case here).

If it is not immoral to torture someone, (breaking with physical integrity) in order to achieve justice, then it will also not be immoral to ignore social rights in favor of economic rights. I'm sending it to you, at least hypothetically, the same for everyone, How can we hierarchically differentiate the laws?

While society's hypocritical eyes are shocked by robberies in upper class neighborhoods, are closed to children who die of hunger on the outskirts. Both would like a more positive attitude from the State and, to some extent they seem to be able to, only proportional to its “importance”.

In light of all this, we must return to the initial question, that allowed all of our reflection, not to answer it, But to put it in more real terms: How to avoid the selective enforcement of laws in a society, based on it, that promotes justice?

Human rights and society
The realization of these rights is long and arduous and, despite having cost many lives, today it is being destroyed in favor of some very specific interests that do not always imply the improvement of the whole, as is often pointed out.

In this sense, Reflecting on human rights means reflecting on society itself, both structurally and politically. It is to reflect on what Hannah Arendt points out as a characteristic of Modernity, the idea of ​​process.

This text, more than seeking the institutional and legal development of human rights, seeks to reflect on the implications of these rights in the life of society.
Law being a human creation, its value must derive from the man himself. That is, its foundation being man himself, we must pay attention to human dignity and not to group specifications.

Human rights, based on man himself, do not require any adjectives to make them valid., unlike other rights, that ask for some uniqueness from the holder.

Since human dignity is a social and moral construct, we have human rights – no matter how universal they are – are the result of a particular time and place. What is worth highlighting is that, despite the various ideological clashes between groups, both within nations and between them, a more basic right that must be sought is to promote the individual's insertion in the political arena.

Anywhere, institutionally controlled by everything from democratic to totalitarian systems, the persistence of some social conditions, economic and political can make the existence of some human beings superfluous, promoting social waste.

The promotion of this social waste threatens the attempt to impose limits on abuses of the whole against the part, This attempt contributed to the transition from the absolutist State to the Rule of Law. As declarações americana e francesa chancelam a idéia de que é o governo que serve ao indivíduo e não o contrário.

A perda de referências e a ação política
We live in a time when traditions are being broken or stored in museums, resulting in a total loss of references. Actions begin to be guided by the unknown that manages to tie the masses and their ideas.

They say – Here is one of those cases – that Brazil has a way, and that for your success, the State must set an example: catch corrupt politicians, arrest some major human rights violators, serial killers…
If example were enough to change things, we could say that the witches who died in the fires of the Inquisition served for something other than the social show. Examples can be enlightening, but never directing or even determining.

What is the point of the State punishing some of those who do not comply with pre-established standards of social coexistence?, if they will not serve as clarification? If the idea is not recognized, The example of this idea is worthless, since it will become the idea itself, that is, closed in this particular and transitory case.

Another point is that an example of conduct serves to show someone, any conduct carried out by another. If we ask and indicate the example of conduct we want to see, so we already know what the idea behind it is.

So why do we wait for the example to only then start acting?? This is also part of the social show? Or should we call it social hypocrisy?
Even so, some ignore the reality that fills the examples, defending the need for the State to set examples, "Isso é para os mais pobres que não têm muita educação". However, stupidity is confusing the stupid with the ignorant.

Anyway, Defending that setting an example is a start so that society can do the same is a bad start.. The State does not have the function of revenge, whether of individuals and their groups, be it the abstract community and society. Selecting cases is revenge, not justice. Why one case is chosen and another is not? Who decides which case will be chosen while the exemplar?

To improve the country we don’t need examples, We don't need philanthropy. We need people capable of tearing off the mask of hypocrisy, sometimes already fused into the faces of our times. We need people who come up with ideas, and not the examples.

It is in this context that we see the birth of societies like Nazi Germany and its variables; that we see dictators becoming so strong that not even the powerful missiles of an image war can destroy. It is in this context that we see democracies that do not care about the demos, and yet they pay great attention to the óikos. The whole and the parts lose their importance in the face of the color of some parts.

Democracy of values?
Schumpterian democracy may be emerging victorious in many places, even in Brazil; However, Reducing democracy to procedures can legitimize an authoritarian government, as long as social blindness is established.

We are proud to live in a democratic country, and we defend democracy. We vote and pay taxes. We hide under empty speeches, in order to hide what really happens: our lives are controlled in a practically totalitarian way.
We elect representatives at all levels, but we do not choose lifestyles, at any level. Why sustain cannons and tanks to suppress the population when we can use the threat of a miserable life?

Enough wealth and splendor has been built into the world for us all to dream, and also enough misery to fear. We all want to reach the top of the mountain and no one wants its rarefied air. This way they steal the air from others. “And this is the world, they say, if you don't agree, will be deleted”. But we are already excluded because all we can be is what we can buy.

People don't love anymore, they only have relationships – that require a two-way path. Nobody wants to be loved, they want to be adored.

The importance of human rights
Human rights, by replacing the human being as the center of debate and action, draws our attention to the fact that the primacy of numbers could be called. After a long political reign, the economy seems to take the crown. Its principles and ideology become the new official religion, religion of unquestionable dogmas.

Governments of various countries around the world, including Brazil, promote institutional reforms, turning your eyes solely to the new god. It is good economic results that direct and qualify transformations. In civil society, any question about this new god is quickly drowned out by the army of saints.
Brazil is among the ten largest economies in the world, however it occupies 66ª position in the HDI (Human Development Index). That is, the problem is not exactly in GDP per capita but rather in the distribution of wealth produced.

The process of transforming a citizen into a city dweller is completed at all levels. still, a worthy man is not one who has a house, a bath or a table to eat (even if you eat garbage). A worthy man is one who knows and accepts himself. Anything that can be set out in a will, even in a testament of wind, Doesn't show a man's dignity.

Your dreams are worthy. In a dream the core is fluid like the dancing clouds. Materializing the dream is destroying it. The same doesn't happen with love, the idea of ​​love is increasingly confused with possession. Be in possession of what you want, be the possession of the desirer. Steel is so strong it can crack. Lead so soft that it just crumples. This is the man, cry so as not to fall on your knees asking for something you never believed in.

Being free is not being able to open the pages of any book, is to understand it. Being free is not being able to walk around, being free is being able to dream.

The primacy of numbers
It is now commonplace to understand education as a lever for economic development. However, as redundant as this may seem, entire societies tend to confuse a common place with an eternal basis of social structuring.
The private school is taken as an example of productivity to be followed, the maximum reference indicated by the new god. Public school reforms address the objective of becoming productive, or they will be closed. In a highly competitive and exclusive society, o vestibular pode demonstrar a ineficácia da uma instituição, no entanto esta ineficácia liga-se especificamente à competição.

Não de forma isolada, os números novamente tomam nossas mentes enquanto uma representação perfeita da realidade. Cálculos percentuais nos mostram a ineficácia da escola pública, as provas estão nos vestibulares das melhores universidades (what, por sinal, geralmente são públicas).

O Brasil passa por um período de aparentes profundas transformações institucionais. Reforma após reforma marcam o cotidiano, dividindo o espaço midiático com as corrupções.
Como que rindo da opinião pública, os casos de corrupção são esquecidos ou ignorados. Legislators accused of corruption leave jail to legislate. Those who make the laws are the first to break them and demonstrations are still made in their favor.
And the absurdity continues in the case of reforms. An entire society is mobilized in favor of institutional transformations in Brazil; but, as in the previous case, We can no longer know who is God and who is the devil, who is good and who is evil.

Instead of promoting transformations aimed at improving Brazilian society,, we promote reforms aimed at improving some specific numbers of the Brazilian economy.
Let’s take labor relations reforms. O resultado de um desenvolvimento de gerações no sentido de resguardar a qualidade de vida do trabalhador está sendo desmontado. Tudo em prol da redução do “custo Brasil”. E quem arcará com o custo social do Brasil? Certamente não serão os mesmos empresários que hoje estão ganhando com a diminuição do custo econômico do Brasil.

As reformas educacionais que estão sendo promovidas hoje no Brasil, a fim de ajudar com o crescimento econômico futuro, se transformará no ponto de estrangulamento deste mesmo crescimento.

Nas escolas públicas, parte significativa dos alunos do segundo grau não conseguem entender um simples e pequeno texto, e, sometimes, têm sérias dificuldades para escrever o próprio nome.

É certo que os trabalhadores de baixo escalão não precisam ser muito educados, However, o desenvolvimento tecnológico ligado ao crescimento econômico exige um mínimo que não está sendo oferecido pela educação formal atual.

Já aqueles que estudam em escolas particulares e chegam à universidade, sabem ler um texto e até mesmo entendê-lo. However, a capacidade de criticar tais textos foi perdida, or better, nunca foi construída.

Estes são aqueles que formarão a próxima geração de empresários que promovem o status quo não por acreditarem em sua superioridade, mas por não saberem o que está acontecendo.
No caso da saúde temos algo parecido. É direcionado um mínimo de verbas à saúde, suficiente para manter viva a massa de trabalhadores a fim de que “nossas” empresas não parem.
Já os abastados podem usufruir dos melhores hospitais para curar depressões e overdoses cujas causas mais profundas estão em suas vidas sem sentido, mesmo porque talvez a vida não precise ter sentido.

E as reformas continuam, passando pela previdência e pelo sistema político. Algumas profundas, outras urgentes, e todas conturbadas.

Estranho que, em tempos ditos globalizados, não atentem para a posição brasileira no globo. Estamos entre as 10 maiores economias do mundo e, However, as reformas que ora vivenciamos não parecem corroborar com uma melhora na distribuição de renda deste país que está entre os 10 mais ricos do mundo. Instead, tais reformas só servem para ajudar-nos a alcançar a posição de primeiro lugar na concentração de renda.

Já que as pessoas costumam gostar de números, deixemos duas questões para serem quantificadas:

reforms, para quantos?
reforms, a que custos?

As reformas propostas, generally, são importantes e fundamentais. Yet, elas precisam ser entendidas num contexto muito maior, e os sociólogos que têm importância e renome deveriam chamar a atenção para o paradoxo das conseqüências. O que precisamos no Brasil é algo muito mais profundo do que os números conseguem mostrar.

Se as reformas das instituições sociais são importantes, reformas sociais são muito mais. Se reformas das instituições e organizações econômicas são importantes, reformas dos objetivos econômicos são muito mais.

Não podemos nos esquecer que número algum consegue expressar a dignidade humana. Além de que ela é muito mais importante do que a dignidade do trabalhador, mesmo porque nem todos conseguem se tornar trabalhadores neste país.

Ao procurarmos números que demonstrem a face econômica, perdemos a capacidade de nos questionar sobre a eficácia da escola na formação de cidadãos.
Melhorar a qualidade do ensino de técnicas é promover a formação de um indivíduo que consegue cumprir mais eficazmente determinadas atividades, However, não está diretamente ligado à promoção da inserção do indivíduo no mundo política.

O sistema educacional precisa de transformações, However, sem uma reflexão maior sobre tais transformações, corremos o risco de os critérios de mercado (do espetáculo, do visível) substituírem os do cidadão.

Mercadorização do Estado
Perder a sociedade enquanto um todo e, in particular, os grupos e indivíduos que têm uma menor força política, é promover a mercadorização do Estado, transformando o cidadão em consumidor.
Levando ao extremo, se o que importa é o sucesso de alguns números econômicos (faz-se investimentos na educação e na saúde buscando o desenvolvimento econômico), então faria mais sentido identificar aquelas atividades que dão maior retorno econômico ao país e aplicar a maioria dos recursos nesta atividade, reservando uma pequena parte para o sistema coercitivo, que seria o responsável por garantir a propriedade privada e o abafamento de levantes populares.

Posições absurdas como estas são possíveis pois estão baseadas numa lógica na qual o mundo imaginário deixa de ser o campo da reflexão para ser o mundo do real. As coisas devem acontecer primeiro na mídia (especialmente a televisiva) para passarem a existir.
Juntando-se a isto, a não-formação de cidadãos faz com que o campo político se atrofie ainda mais. That is, a democracia, que deveria ser o espaço para o debate multilateral, esvazia-se de conteúdo para ser legitimada somente na sua imagem.
Faz-se necessário marcar que defender os direitos humanos não é defender a gratuidade dos serviços públicos, é defender a promoção objetiva de algumas condições mínimas para que o indivíduo possa se tornar um cidadão.

Falar em direitos humanos é questionar o processo atual, segundo o qual os meios estão se tornando o lugar, levando à descaracterização dos fins, que passam a habitar esse novo lugar.
Sao Paulo, October 1999

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