Cognitive Paralysis Before Ideological Power

Three current political examples show how language, public image and resentment can replace individual judgment with narrative allegiance.

OVERCOMING COGNITIVE PARALYSIS (II)
Three current examples of applied Marxism
By Dr. Nelson Jorge Mosco Castellano

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva: The Occupation of Language and the Ethics of Impunity
In Lula’s case, the application of Olavo’s concepts reveals a corruption of language in which words lose their descriptive meaning and become tools of combat.
The systematic use of the concept of “political persecution” or lawfare to cancel out proven facts of private and state corruption. Under this model, language is not used to seek legal truth, but to create a parallel reality in which the trial is not about a crime, but about a political identity.
Lula embodies the idea that the “leader” stands above universal moral categories.
He transforms justice into an ideological battlefield, annulling the citizen’s ability to judge concrete facts, plunging him into a paralysis in which loyalty to the group replaces honesty toward one’s own experience, and responsibility for one’s actions.
Material reality, the diversion of funds, is devoured by the narrative of the “savior of the people”.
Pedro Sánchez: The Engineering of Perception and the Emptiness of Power
The model applied to Sánchez highlights what Olavo called the loss of the map of reality, in which the ruler no longer responds to principles, but to the pure mechanics of power through control of discourse.
The constant change of position on fundamental issues, such as amnesty for terrorists and territorial pacts that dissolve the State, under the name of “resilience” or “changes of opinion”.
Here, language becomes fluid and devoid of substance; words no longer pretend to be true, but useful for immediate survival in power.
Sánchez operates through the disorientation of the individual.
By breaking the relationship between verbal promise and political action, a form of functional idiocy is fostered in the electorate: the inability to foresee consequences.
It is the triumph of the “grammar of opportunism” over institutional logic, where the individual is reduced to a passive spectator of a choreography of power with no anchor in tradition or historical truth.
José Mujica: The Myth of Austerity as Intellectual Anesthesia
The analysis of Mujica through this lens is perhaps the most subtle, because it focuses on the creation of a romantic image that serves to conceal the deficiencies of state management and the erosion of individual responsibility.
The construction of the character of the “poor president”.
Although personal austerity is valuable, in Mujica’s political praxis it functioned as a moral shield to neutralize criticism of failed economic policies, their economic and social cost, or institutional disorder, as in the idea that “politics stands above the law”.
Mujica applies what Olavo criticized as the primacy of “aesthetics” over “ethics” and reason.
The citizen, captivated by charisma and the rhetoric of simplicity, tends to forgive the inefficiency of the State.
A vision is promoted in which the “intention” of the romantic revolutionary replaces the objective evaluation of results.
It is the perfect example of how a powerful personal narrative can block a society’s faculty of judgment, preventing it from seeing the real consequences of social engineering on freedom and productivity.
In all three cases, one observes the replacement of the sovereign individual, the one who judges by facts and logic, by a subject mobilized by narrative emotions.
For Olavo, the first step in not being an “idiot” before these leaderships would be to strip the leader of his rhetorical disguise and force him to answer before the grammar of reality and the responsibility for his actions in every order.
Sir Roger Scruton would add the dimension of affection, beauty and cultural inheritance.
For Scruton, it is not enough to be “logically precise”; the human being needs roots.
Scruton’s “idiot” is not only the one who thinks badly, but the one who does not know how to love what he has and therefore surrenders to resentment.
Here are the four elements that Scruton would add to this model of denunciation:
The concept of “Oikophobia”, the hatred of home.
While Olavo denounces the inability to think, Scruton would denounce the inability to belong.
Scruton would observe that Lula, Sánchez and Mujica, each in his own way, promote a form of oikophobia: the rejection of traditional institutions, natural hierarchy and the cultural inheritance of the West in favor of a “global utopia” or an abstract “social justice”.
He would say that these leaders uproot the citizen, teaching him to see his own history and customs as something oppressive that must be dismantled, leaving him orphaned of identity and therefore easier to manipulate.
Scruton identified the engine of socialism as the fallacy of resentment: the idea that if someone succeeds, it is because he has taken something away from someone else.
He would say that the rhetoric of these leaders is based on dividing society into “victims and victimizers”. For Scruton, this is a spiritual blindness.
The man who “is not an idiot” is the one who practices gratitude. He recognizes that civilization is inherited capital, made of laws, customs and language, which we must preserve.
The socialist, by destroying this capital in the name of “egalitarianism”, ends up destroying the foundations that allow the poorest to progress, to rise through a spirit of self-improvement and merit, and to leave their economic situation through the conviction that this is necessary.
For Scruton, aesthetics is also political.
Socialism and modernism tend to create ugly, utilitarian and bureaucratic environments.
Observe how these movements degrade public space and high culture in order to turn them into “mass culture” or propaganda.
In order not to be an idiot, one must cultivate taste. Beauty reminds us that we are spiritual beings, not merely “units of consumption” or “social classes”.
Whoever appreciates beauty does not allow himself to be seduced by the moral ugliness of demagogy.
Law as “Civil Association”, not “Social Enterprise”
Scruton made a key distinction: society must be a universitas, people with a freely shared common purpose, and not a societas, an enterprise directed by the State toward a single end.
He would criticize Sánchez or Lula for using the law as a hammer to remodel society through social engineering.
Freedom is not “doing whatever one wants”, but living under laws shaped by the best positive customs and by mutual respect.
The “idiot” is the one who believes that the State can, and must, legislate happiness or equality of outcomes, ignoring that this can only be achieved by destroying individual freedom.
The result of the Olavo-Scruton synthesis
If we bring them together, the diagnosis against these leaders would be devastating:
Olavo would say: “You lie and manipulate language so that people cannot see reality”.
Scruton would add: “And by doing so, you rob them of their home, their beauty and their ability to be grateful for their destiny, turning society into a crowd of resentful and dependent individuals”.
For Scruton, escaping idiocy is not only a triumph of intelligence, but a triumph of character and love for the concrete over the murderous abstractions of ideology.

Political language as a substitute for reality.
Narrative leadership and the anesthesia of individual judgment.
Olavo, Scruton and the defense of character against ideology.

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