Tag: behavior

In Brazil, the average citizen spends his entire adult life without reading a single work of fiction. This cannot be normal, except in a culturally dead society. It is safe to say that no Brazilian writer today has the slightest influence on society, despite what the names of some streets and monuments might suggest. There is not a single literary work whose characters or moral lessons are present in the collective imagination, and so the most astonishing fact about Brazil today is that it has no cultural base to serve as a foundation and common heritage. It is not just an educational tragedy, but a human one.

It is hard to gauge how mediocre a man has to be to not only adapt to, but take as his own an idea conceived by half a dozen bureaucrats, which directly confronts what is truly his. An idea, sometimes unprecedented in human history, sometimes grossly stupid, unequivocally nonsensical and infamous, whose application involves a drastic and sudden behavioral change, whose practical effect is to demean the past and break a long and honorable tradition, but an idea that is nevertheless swallowed up! Such success seems to indicate that a society can be physically destroyed by an external agent, but that it can only be corrupted voluntarily.

Sometimes it is very difficult to detect falsehood when analyzing just words, but it is always possible to assume how much the sender gains from uttering them. In other words, we can always measure their impact on his personal interests. None of this is new; however, this little-practiced exercise is great for classifying those who demand caution, and those whose speech authenticity can be trusted.

It is always a great challenge to balance conflicting tensions when a predominant tendency manifests itself in the spirit, either compelling externalization or internalization. The personality often reveals this difficulty, the main problem of which is not to follow or move away from the innate tendency, but to deal with the opposite, which often presents itself as a duty. A duty, then, to act against one’s nature, to continually do the most painful thing, under constant threat of condemnation by one’s conscience! Perhaps this is the greatest usefulness of biographies: to record the sprouts of this conflict in the lives of those for whom living is opposed to doing work.