Three levels below the lie

Abigail Pereira Aranha

Is there a lower intellectual level and even level of human dignity than the life around the defense of the lie? Yes, and it is a lower level than sincerely believe the lie as if it was truth.

A region of regular development level in the standards of a Third World country has an advantage in intellectual, cultural, moral and even psychiatric terms: to make more visible despicable things that ugliness, low education, old age, disease, or socioeconomic failure can make it uglier. Advantage if you have, in addition to mental integrity, the conditions to not to be overwhelmed or driven yourself into general misery, such as your own money, your own home or physical contact with better geographical areas.

The defense of the lie requires at least three things: knowledge of the truth, knowledge of the people to whom the lie will be told, and an intended practical outcome. Therefore, the defense of the lie requires a presence in the real world with some intelligence.

But even organized lying is above the normal mental level of the populations of countries and regions with low moral and cultural level (and where poor socioeconomic indices use to be only a consequence), especially where representatives of the general mediocrity were once or still are in the formal political office. In these places, countless slickers have owed or still owe to a specific spurious stream of politics and thinking not just a social status, but even the possibility of having a job. But a far greater number of persons in the people owe this lie from some possibility to a less miserable (even economically) everyday life to the escape to the humiliating encounter with something superior even when the lie they support is a notorious cause of their own poverty.

The first level below life around the lie is the hatred against truth and greatness. It's not the compulsive lie. It's to transform what is noble, righteous or beautiful into as it was a personal enemy. This also do not achieve to be an envy of people with greatness of mind. The envious has desire or appreciation for what the envied has, and the person on this level does not reach the point of even considering the truth or the greatness of a person as something respectable.

The second level below life around the lie is the war on the real world. Because the war on greatness has been lost. Here, the real world itself is a problem in itself. From what we can see in the Bible, Satan himself would still be on this level, since he wants to change God's creation to something else in his own style. But for that, he still needs to act within the real world. The bad part of functional socialist militancy is at this level as well. But there is still a level where not even they reach it.

The third level below life around the lie is the war on mental sanity. The war against the real world has been lost. What remains for this person is to attack the wisdom, the intelligence, the sense of proportion, and the sense of ridicule. The person may try to do this in people under his or her influence, especially dependent children, but does it first in himself or herself. This person becomes a mentally ill in the technical sense. But that does not mean that he or she is a harmless person, because that person, within the mental and moral illness, attacks the real world. An unbalanced woman who physically assaults and breaks objects in a stupid discussion is an example of this level.

For example, a lesbian begins with the lie of an injustice against female homosexuality, goes to the first level with an aversion to men and heterosexual women, to the second level with the war against the prevailing view of heterosexuality as biologically normal (she demeans the biological fact to a sociocultural fact that, though recognized, can be worked on) and to the third level with the statement that she herself, visually and behaviorally repulsive, is a powerful and sexually desirable woman.

Brazilian national life in general since Lula's election to the Presidency of the Republic is an example of these three levels. It is also a sign that even if the third-level image is a depressing periphery of households of ugly and failed people, such a community has a sociopolitical importance that cannot be ignored. Especially when policies such as the socio-racial quota system and the illiterate vote can introduce poverty of mind where it is most desirable not to be. Lula was reelected after the denounce of the Mensalão with even more votes than for the first mandate and he won even more votes for an irrelevance called Dilma Rousseff because at that point, millions of people started to owe their socioeconomic lives, from a good job in the public service to a state benefit in Bolsa Família, to the Workers' Party's political-administrative system. Universities, the press, artistic-cultural production, the public service and even large private companies approached the people in the pejorative sense, in the sense of the representativeness of the mediocre. This could really only be done by people who were already in positions of power or decision, for personal, group or ideological interests. But the popular base existed and was important enough to make the whole tragedy, at least in the beginning and for a while, through the normal means of a formal democracy. And as the electoral victories of the Workers' Party after the denunciations of the Mensalão and Petrolão demonstrated (schemes made, therefore, so long as the party was not dedicated to making a formidable government, as the subsequent crisis confirmed), a nation that is in these three levels below the lie can continue or deepen in this process of degradation even or perhaps especially when it pays dearly for the war against truth and greatness even in, let us say, the less intellectual parts of its everyday life.

The problem I describe here also happens in the libertarian and conservative political wings. It also happens in the traditional Christian community. It also happens in the First World. But the left-wing of the 2010s especially in Brazil and the United States, and even more the alienated populations influenced or favored by this left-wing, help to show us this problem in a striking visual form. For example, the Facebook profile of a typical nowadays feminist or Christian woman shows a not giving herself the obligation to deserve respect that a mid-twentieth-century woman still gave herself, even when she was semi-illiterate, psychiatrically unstable, and sympathetic to the police-juridical violence against atheists and women who are sex workers.

You may have noticed, but I say it more directly here: Brazil in general still has to improve a lot in the clinical sense (it's not even in the intellectual sense) so that an intellectually qualified person can get into an intellectual debate and run the risk of finding at least a cheater. By the way, it was my mistake when I thought, since 2006, that any exposition of ideas made by an unknown girl would generate debate or at least attract the attention of a significant number of people as long as it was reasonably lucid. The work wasn't lost only because I left it on the internet and it was found by other anonymous here and there who were as thirsty to see manifestations of mental integrity as myself. Well, some guys were looking for porn and found me, but liking licentiousness (in theory and practice) also means a certain moral and mental integrity.

I am still trying to understand how to tackle this problem, but four things I understood. 1) the level to be confronted is always the last, because defeat on one level leads to the lowest level. 2) for each person with moral and mental integrity, confronting people at the third level in the national context, in the regional context or even on the internet is essentially the same as confronting people at the same level in the closest environment in the physical world. 3) this confrontation involves an increasing in personal power, especially when the person in question is from one's own family (and I remind that personal power is autonomy over the own life in the individual sense, and this includes the ability to rid oneself of the negative power of other people). 4) since making one's own presence unpleasant is part of the limited power of action of these persons, confrontation involves good humor and ridicularization of these persons at the slithering level of their presence in the physical world, not at the level of sane and intelligent conversation with mentally healthy persons.