The Garden of Afflictions and the revolt against utopias

A liberal reading of Olavo de Carvalho, cognitive parallax and the political temptation to manage human freedom.

The Garden of Afflictions and the rebellion against utopias
A liberal reading of Olavo de Carvalho, cognitive parallax, and the danger of political projects that promise to redeem man by abolishing his freedom.
By Dr. Nelson Jorge Mosco Castellano

The Garden of Afflictions is considered Olavo de Carvalho’s masterpiece. It is a dense philosophical essay that begins with an apparently minor event —a lecture by Epicurus— in order to unfold the structure of Western thought and political power.
Carvalho argues that the history of the West is marked by the tension between temporal power and spiritual power.
He analyzes how the idea of a “Universal Empire” has mutated from the Roman Empire, through the Holy Roman Empire, until reaching modern forms of globalism.
The author argues that every attempt to create a universal human state ultimately becomes a structure of totalitarian control that suffocates individual freedom.
The book uses the garden of Epicurus as a metaphor for intellectual isolation.
The “Garden” represents the space where the philosopher withdraws from the political world in search of individual peace.
Olavo argues that this withdrawal is an illusion. By abandoning commitment to objective truth and metaphysics, the individual becomes vulnerable to state forces. For him, Epicureanism is the root of modern materialism and subjectivism.
The Triangle of Power
The author identifies three forces that have historically sought world hegemony:
Globalism: represented by financial elites and international organizations.
The Revolutionary Movement: mainly Marxism and its derivatives.
Islamism: as an expansive political-religious force.
One of the most famous concepts introduced by Olavo is cognitive parallax.
It refers to the displacement between the axis of a philosopher’s theoretical construction and the axis of his real experience as a human being.
Olavo criticizes intellectuals who propose theories they themselves could not live by, or who deny the reality of their own existence while formulating them.
The book is a fierce defense of individualism against collectivism. Carvalho argues that modernity has replaced religion with “ideology.”
The modern State does not seek justice, but the management of human conduct through psychology and sociology.
There is a degradation of language, traditional values and high culture that prevents people from perceiving their own servitude.
The Rebellion of Intelligence against the Engineering of Utopias
We find ourselves at a crossroads where Western civilization is torn between returning to its nourishing sources —freedom and responsibility— or capitulating before a new caste of gurus who seek to “manage” human existence as if it were a warehouse inventory.
This attempt at social automation, today disguised as twenty-first-century Marxism, is nothing more than the repetition of a fatal arrogance: the idea that a bureaucracy can replace the marvelous and subtle fabric of individual freedom.
It is imperative to denounce what Olavo de Carvalho masterfully dissected: cognitive parallax.
We are facing intellectuals who inhabit a “Garden” of abstractions, projecting systems of absolute control while they themselves breathe the oxygen of the freedom they seek to suffocate.
It is the schizophrenia of those who preach dispossession from opulence and nationalization from private autonomy.
By divorcing their theory from their own lived experience, these builders of utopias become moral ghosts.
They deny the human agency of others in order to validate themselves as the only agents capable of “seeing” the truth.
That disconnection is the first step toward totalitarianism: when reality obstructs the scheme, it is reality that must be sacrificed.
The Fallacy of “Entitlement” Rights and the Brake on Creation
Contemporary politics has fallen into the perversion of believing that need creates rights.
As the liberal tradition has rightly insisted, from Hayek to Mises, a right is a faculty that protects freedom, not a blank check against the effort of others.
To create “entitlement” rights without productive support is an act of legislated plunder.
Every time a paper right is invented, a shackle is placed on the creativity of the individual.
The market is not a tug-of-war of material interests, but a process of discovery.
It is the space where the individual, moved by his own inventiveness, detects the need of another and creates solutions.
By “automating” the social response through the State, we kill the capacity for wonder and innovation that has lifted the most deprived from the original and natural misery in which our ancestors lived.
The Ethical Superiority of Spontaneous Order
Against the cold schematism of the planner, we must revalue the natural solution.
Wealth is not a static figure to be distributed; it is a dynamic flow to be created. True social justice is not the redistribution of scarcity, but the multiplication of opportunities through unrestricted respect for the life project of others.
The West paid a high price in blood and sacrifice to understand that freedom is a prerequisite for dignity.
The gurus of automation promise a risk-free paradise that does not exist and that they never attain, but history shows that the path they offer leads inevitably to the silence of machines and the emptiness of souls.
The pillars of civilizational reconstruction imply forcing the ideologue to live under the laws of his own “garden.”
Epistemological humility means recognizing that knowledge is dispersed and that order is born from freedom, not command.
Understanding property rights as the ultimate bulwark against tyranny and the basis of all economic calculation for collective development.
Defending the law as the shield of the individual, and the word as a tool of light against the slogan.
The battle is not economic; it is metaphysical.
It is about deciding whether man is a subject of the State to be programmed or a child of freedom called to create for the benefit of all.
To revalue individual creativity and legal certainty is not to defend an accounting system; it is to defend the very essence of the human against those who, in the name of a utopian equality, only seek to manage our servitude.

Olavo and power.
Utopia versus freedom.
Spontaneous order.

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