Deus ex machina; Or the Eternal Search for the Brazilian Demiurge

Originally published in Estado da Arte, a magazine affiliated with Estadão, on November 20, 2020.

Sanctify them by the truth;

Your word is truth.

John 17:17

The Divine Intervention

It’s almost common knowledge that the “scriptwriters” of Brazilian politics are far from the best. Although there’s some excitement in the story, the plot constantly challenges our suspension of disbelief: the twists lack plausibility, limited settings imply a low budget, and the actors are so bad and caricatured they seem to struggle with basic human behavior—even to play themselves. It’s all so contrived. The protagonists, however, with their authoritarian airs, have a certain charisma, but let me explain why this only makes things worse.

Interpretative lines that appear when trying to explain Brazilian authoritarianism are typically structural. They rightly cite the country’s roots in slavery, inequality, corruption, violence, and patrimonialism.[1] This last concept, popularized by Raymundo Faoro, points to the existence of a bureaucratic class in Brazil that, through private use of public resources, acts as if it owns the state. It’s a hardened noble class that has endured from the colonial era to the republic. Faoro himself, however, notes that sometimes the people revolt against their rulers in futile uprisings, ending up right where they started. Here’s where another interpretative key for Brazil emerges, one that is somewhat overlooked. Allow me one quote, I promise not to be tiresome:

“While the bureaucratic class conducts its superior, autonomous politics, managing crises with top-down Bonapartist revolutions, the mystique of the saving revolution develops—official as ever, as Joaquim Nabuco pointed out. Amid tumultuous order and fostered anarchy, the masses, bewitched by hopes and nourished by enthusiasm, incense the hidden deus ex machina who will remedy all woes and soothe all sufferings. The two parts—society and the bureaucratic class—opposing and unknown to each other, live in the same country yet aim at opposite ends: one awaits a miracle worker, embodied in some politician who wrings everything from his supporters, while the other remains and endures, balanced in its stable trapeze.”[2]

Faoro’s book is thoroughly dedicated to the bureaucratic caste but brushes against a possible transition to another Weberian concept: charismatic domination. The people, who have lost almost everything to poverty and despair, look to the horizon with only hope in their eyes—a sentiment which, like anything eternal, can be malicious toward its host. The dreamer doesn’t want an intangible future country but rather one that will be here tomorrow morning. Preferably early. In this urgency, there’s no point talking about long-term projects or scientifically grounded public policies. There’s only one possible solution for Brazil: divine intervention. And in our endless search for God, we always find a prophet.

The concept of charisma is originally theological, used to describe divine gifts. In Weber’s view, charismatic domination is a devotion that an individual has to a leader by virtue of his supposedly exalted, extraordinary, or even magical character.[3] The real essence of this character, as ordinary as it may be, is of little consequence. The faith of followers is enough to deify the leader and build the necessary affections that a power relationship demands. A transformation takes place in the psyche: misery and fear, when met with hope, gradually transform into enthusiasm, love, and fanaticism. Servitude becomes effective because it is not only voluntary; it is passionate. Those who were once lost and wretched now find their true source of salvation in their chosen demiurge. Every problem is personified as if, suddenly, a blue light would descend from the heavens, thunderously, feeding the hungry with chocolate, healing the sick with snake oil, jailing the corrupt, and fixing all plot holes.

The worst part is that this plot is repetitive. We’ve seen this story many times in Brazil. We might as well call all these protagonists by one name—Getúlio, Juscelino, Fernando, Luís, or Jair. They were indeed different in the direction of their actions, but for their followers, each embodied a divine, immediate solution to perennial problems. The recurring failure is a minor detail in the certainty that success will come tomorrow because now we’re following the true prophet. What’s the chance of being wrong yet again? After all, the Hebrew people worshiped even a golden calf before rediscovering God—and still weren’t as mistaken as we are.

As with all of Brazil’s political and social woes, Portugal can boast of having done it all before us. Some might argue that Sebastianism is our historical precedent: a mystical Portuguese movement that saw in King Sebastian, long disappeared, a martyr who would return to restore Portugal to its glorious past. However, it’s more likely that it’s not an ideological lineage of prophets rooted in Portugal, but that the conditions that enabled the construction of idols were present both there in the sixteenth century and here in the twenty-first.

Socioeconomic conditions represent one of the primary triggers for the rise of a charismatic leader. Faith and the personification of hope are nurtured in a state of deprivation, where the greatest needs can be satisfied by the smallest crumbs; bread is the Messiah’s first gift, proof of his divine power. Beyond everyday poverty, crises—whether social, political, or economic—create the latent conditions for the search for immediate salvation. Crisis drives people to a state of fervor against the established order. In desperation, there’s no patience for remedies that might be more effective but are bitter and slow. The target is broad—it’s everything out there—and salvation will come from anyone who promises its destruction to lift, on its ruins, those who feel excluded, deceived, and enraged. The leader becomes the collective representation of all these feelings, shaping his narrative to prove his gift. With all hopes condensed, followers now yield entirely to the body that represents them. Voting isn’t enough; he requires adoration: each gesture of affection strengthens his assurance that the prophet has indeed returned; each attack on him is an affront to God, and the response will be equally passionate, perhaps even venomous, against the heretic. The gears of domination begin to turn in earnest, completing the curving of the bodies: the individual, once standing tall and enraged, now weeps as he bends his knees, craving contact with the transcendent, his hands clawing the ground, ready to grovel. This is the great skill of the charismatic leader: turning diffuse rebellion into concrete submission.

The Naked Man

Charisma is not an intrinsic personal quality but a successful claim to power. Bryan Wilson created a rather illustrative image.[4] If a man runs naked through the city streets, raving to the heavens that Judgment Day is near and he alone can save us, you’ll likely think him mad. But if that same man does exactly the same thing and, for some reason, people start to follow him, equally naked, praying to be among the chosen in the inevitable eschatology that awaits us, he is a charismatic leader. The great difference between the two men is that one succeeded in convincing a crowd that the stairway to paradise requires some exotic form of naturism. For this reason, any outside observer will find it all rather ridiculous, perhaps even comic. He’ll stand there watching this man running, his body jiggling, wrinkles sagging, face shrieking. This is God, the followers will proclaim. A bunch of lunatics, the observer will think.

The degree of domination varies with each case. Perhaps some followers, maybe even most, will limit themselves to the fanatical verbal defense of the leader’s actions, no matter how contradictory or indefensible. It’s ultimately a torch-bearing factionalism. At some point in his rise, the leader will be opposed by individuals surely alienated by capital or brainwashed by terrifying, dangerous, and sinister communist teachers in primary school. In response, he has his militia—nowadays even virtual. Some people, however, have limits; the challenge is to find them. Corruption would be a guess if it hadn’t become a Brazilian cliché, synonymous with Friday. The accused can always borrow the speech of the last individual awakened at 6 a.m. by a federal police operation, claiming it’s a persecution by the judge, prosecutor, legislature, judiciary, supreme court, globalists, capital, KGB, CIA, communists, dark forces, perhaps all together or whatever fits best into the official narrative. The naked crowd will easily buy into it: it’s a conspiracy of the wicked against the good. There will be no shortage of comparisons of the leader to Jesus Christ, both crucified by worldly injustice. A former ally will appear as Judas, an enemy as Pilate, high-ranking followers as apostles. This is the quality of the plot, the Brazilian hero’s journey: it has a promise of salvation, accusations of corruption, conspiracy allegations, and a poorly developed Bible rip-off. It’s the summary of our script. The dominated are certain they’ve foreseen the final act: the resurrection, followed by the judgment of all infidel conspirators. God would not let it end any other way with His envoy.

It’s easy to counter corruption charges with conspiracies. These narratives already circulate in some form in the popular imagination, needing only slight adaptations for some obscure specter like American imperialism, Cuban communism, globalism, or the Supreme Court, already seen as villains by a significant part of the population, to reappear now even more dangerous, more demonic, to thwart our last chance at salvation. Only for this reason are we not rich, great, and powerful: the world stands in our way. If everything else disappeared, I doubt anyone would surpass us.

If corruption is not the limit, where do we find it? Some followers may go all the way, literally, like the collective suicide of Jim Jones’s cult, an extreme case of obedience to the leader unto death, even if the follower count was limited. Hitler, an equally extreme example, met his end, but in Brazil, there aren’t many chances of losing a war. The most likely path seems to be the least threatening: routine. It’s easier to sell oneself as the savior of the nation by denouncing everything that’s out there than by actually governing, making economic decisions, negotiating posts, bills, dealing with other branches, all while the followers pray that their hopes will be fulfilled, that their table will be richer, their car better, their house paid off, and that the country they wanted for tomorrow morning will somehow be better than it is today. Reality is the charismatic leader’s biggest enemy because the miracle becomes an eternal promise. In daily life, when the enthusiasm fades and the subject realizes he remains a poor wretch, he decides to pull up his underwear and go home.

The prophet is aware of his own limits and must always thwart this threat by attempting to make everyday life perpetually unusual, to make the fervor that elevated him the new normal. With his ambition already satisfied at the country’s highest office, he must turn the administrative routine into an endless campaign. The rhetoric won’t soften, and the enemy, already defeated, will be redefined as a new threat. Every political failure will be justified by the new version of the conspiracy, and thus the factional militia will continue to be mobilized for political war, even after victory. These are successive attempts at prophetic reenchantment to maintain the fanatical base’s engagement during the government routine. But success in this new phase is more uncertain; the alliances formed with the status quo—yesterday the moral enemy of paradise—may sound contradictory to more skeptical followers. They may suspect betrayal, hearing whispers and murmurs, disturbing rumors, seeing malicious smiles; perhaps everyone already knows, but cuckoldry is a postponed awareness. There’s an evident problem in the narrative: the leader rose against everything out there, but an alliance with everything out there is a clear necessity in representative systems. Even recurring attempts at re-engagement may prove insufficient. Ultimately, reality tends to impose itself on everyone, and thus it must be fought.

Metanoia

In The Emperor’s New Clothes, a famous tale by Hans Christian Andersen, a deceitful tailor from a distant land appears in a kingdom offering the ruler a unique garment that only the most intelligent and astute could see. The king, before such a precious thing, couldn’t contain his aristocratic pride and dedicated treasure chests of riches to the tailor, who quickly set to work, pretending to weave invisible threads. Impatient with the delay, the king sent his ministers who, out of pride and unable to see anything, praised the conman’s magnificent work. Later, the king himself visited the tailor’s shop, praising the fictitious clothes. Admitting he saw nothing would announce his own foolishness and inability to govern, an indignity hard for a noble’s pride. With the work finished, the king paraded his new adornment, even with chamberlains to hold his invisible train. During the parade, the people, of course, saw the truth but lacked the courage to announce it. Until a child shouted: the king is naked. The people began to whisper among themselves and soon echoed the boy’s shout. The farce was revealed to all.[5]

The difference between the prophet and the foolish king lies in the eye of the beholder. In a situation of charismatic domination, the submissive part of the population cannot see the leader’s nakedness. This is not about flattery, vanity, or fear, as with the king and his ministers. The emotional bond is so strong that followers begin reading reality through the cult’s official narrative. A divinity cannot lie; His word is truth, and if the word asserts He is not naked, then He is not. This is sanctified truth. Followers undergo a metanoia in which the leader holds a monopoly on their ideological interpretation. It’s almost like the conspiracy of the mark of the beast. But to avoid turning this into gospel sci-fi, let’s say the charismatic version of metanoia is a sort of psychic drug that distorts the faithful’s perception of reality based on the leader’s word. If, in Andersen’s tale, everyone can see the facts when the boy shouts the king is naked, here the poor innocent boy will hear a thousand curses for spreading falsehoods against the messiah. His father must be a communist.

If metanoia is successfully accomplished, the obstacles reality tries to impose on the leader are softened because followers can no longer see them. The contradictions of alliances, deals, and broken promises are distorted by the new lenses of the official narrative. There is no more contradiction, only the word of truth. Cuckoldry reaches the peak of submission. Every absurd explanation suffices to allay doubts. If the leader says something condemnable, he was misunderstood; if he tries to deliver on what he promised but everything goes wrong, it’s because the wicked conspired against him [insert cult-specific conspiracy here]; if he promised something during the campaign but, once in power, does the opposite, they feign amnesia—the prophet always promised exactly this, you just didn’t understand; if data showing poor results appears, it’s because they’re fake and the enemies are distorting the information. For every action, there is a sermon. For every failure, a conspiracy. For every heresy, a punishment.

If it wasn’t already implied, here’s a clarification of the difference between a charismatic leader and an ordinary vote-winner. Political success doesn’t depend exclusively on supposed supernatural qualities. A president can reach office—and remain there—through well-crafted marketing, political capital efficiently mobilized in building solid alliances, or even by luck. Passion is not the only factor at play. Depending on the situation, economic interests and moral values are as effective as a promise of salvation. A vote-winner, therefore, may have some demagoguery, but he doesn’t make prophetic promises, doesn’t build a personalized domination relationship, and thus never reaches the stage of metanoia. It’s not uncommon for a bureaucratic politician, whose greatest virtue is fulfilling the role of a word processor, a mouthpiece for public policies, and a regurgitator of numbers, to achieve success. But his contradictions are noticed. Support wanes when interests or values aren’t met. The bodies do not bow to his will.

With the advent of social media, the metanoia process intensified. The leader’s truth can be directly transmitted to followers, eliminating intermediaries. Emotions now feel even more intimate; everything sounds personal. Followers watch the speech in the palm of their hand as if it were addressed directly to them. There’s no crowd sharing the space, as in rallies. They listen attentively, nodding to every revelation while stroking their screens. Every word is beautiful, the curses are poetry, and he makes them laugh and cry. It doesn’t matter that the scoundrel says the same thing to everyone else; omnia vincit amor.

This is why the fight against disinformation, or what has popularly become known as “fake news,” seems so fruitless. Suppose you tell the cultist that a news story is false. Even if he is defeated by his own ignorance and has no way of countering you, the response will be blind denial. He’ll search desperately for truth hidden among lies, and upon finding a sliver of it—a phrase, a line, a word, whatever it may be—he’ll cling to that flicker of truth as confirmation of the whole. From then on, you’re the liar, driven by partisanship and ideology to deny the sanctified word’s sincerity. Nothing more can be done. There’s no convincing someone their interpretation of the facts is wrong if, first of all, they didn’t interpret anything. Everything was transmitted to them. The ideas arrive ready, without resistance, filling the void between their forehead and the back of their skull.

Sometimes, followers appear lost immediately after a new fact. It’s because there hasn’t been enough time for the official narrative to reach them; without the leader’s orders, they don’t know if what’s being said is true or false, if the new law should be defended or attacked, or if the moral value in public discussion is beautiful or monstrous. The whispers grow, each scattering in different directions. What do I believe?, they ask, calling out to God. The divine answer arrives, as promised, and everything reorganizes, soldiers fall in line: of course what’s being said is false; of course this undeniable law must be defended; and how dare they discuss such a monstrous immorality? All doubts vanish when the truth is proclaimed. Metanoia can be a comfortable drug; when answers are simply revealed, there’s no tedious task of seeking them. The prophet is chosen before information. In its more extreme versions, the charismatic leader is the privy in which all universal truths are deposited.

The lenses distorted by metanoia are, for the leader, the guarantees of maintaining his power. Since they cannot be removed, under the risk of a glimpse of the real world, it’s impossible to perform effective antisepsis. Despite the addiction, the drug’s effects may deteriorate, and the relationship of submission gradually crumbles. Faced with all this, madness may seem perpetual, but the shackles are more fragile than eternity. If diffuse revolt precedes concrete submission, submission can precede a new revolt.

The End and the Remake

Maintaining concentrated charismatic power in a single figure for too long is difficult. There are extraordinary examples, like Jesus Christ, whose charisma was institutionalized by the Church’s structures, enduring millennia. However, most once-beloved names became targets of revolts. They may meet their fate in suicide notes, hanged by their intestines, or forcibly retired on some secluded island. The promises are too grand, prophets become false gods, and divinity comes to be seen as idolatry. This happened even to more glorious names than the vulgar, lazy versions that sprouted in Brazil, where both democracy and despotism are half-hearted. Even those buried with fear, who still commanded with empty eyes and were heard with shut mouths, had their memories rewritten, their deeds reinterpreted, becoming representatives of an era to be forgotten. All their charisma was expelled with their last breath. The tyrant’s fate is to be the disgrace of history. The aspiring tyrant is merely a nuisance of the decade. But good news comes with a warning. Since it can be hard to live so long with one’s liver in one’s ears, I assure the impatient that not all prophets, no matter how mediocre, are mere footnotes in the country’s history. The joy of the end is, at best, a small consolation after years of unhealthy resilience.

Even with metanoia, routine tends to impose itself on more ephemeral leaders. There’s no reason to believe we aren’t dealing with such leaders now. With blurred lenses, shattered patience, the masses, with a deep sense of betrayal, begin reassessing the nauseous years they endured. Looking around, they find the same misery as before. Looking forward, they see a sagging behind. My God, the king is naked, they’ll exclaim in horror. Suddenly, the narratives, conspiracies, rip-offs, and poorly crafted plots stop making sense. It’s the hangover that precedes the interregnum. Many will remain loyal, saying, It only didn’t work because you sabotaged it. With a new revolt against everything out there, the leader finally leaves, once again leaving us only hope. From here on, everything is quite familiar; the elements are the same as at the beginning. The question we ask is, who will step up in the queue of discredited projects? There’s room for some suspense: will our new miracle-worker be novel, with original traits? Will it be the return of a saint from long ago, favored by our periodic amnesia? Or will it be a mix of both, a new name rehashing an “ism” we forgot we hated? If I sound somewhat optimistic in believing these hardships are temporary, I fear falling into the same fatalism as Faoro, seeing a future caged by the past.

The industry truly loves to copy or remake franchises that once succeeded. This may annoy long-time fans but draws crowds of enthusiasts. The new version has different actors and a few changes. Charisma is not a moral term, has no ideological biases, and can adopt various political, social, and economic perspectives. Without contradiction, it can describe Hitler and Jesus Christ, capitalists and communists, progressives and reactionaries. The promised paradise has many forms for each era, leader, or believer. I know, in the end, no one considers themselves a cult member and may accuse me of injustice. They’ll say everything I wrote applies to the others, to that fanatic other side, to them, not us. Of course, “we” don’t represent a cult or idolatry; “we” hold the truth, while they, the other faction, worship false gods. I admit there are obvious differences among churches. Some may be more efficient, less violent, even achieve satisfactory results. But it’s not because a cult doesn’t commit the cannibal act of devouring a bovine carcass on the altar that it ceases to be a cult.

Either way, the fact is that our woes have never been vanquished, nor our anxieties soothed. Perhaps it’s time to bet on a new, less immediate approach, with evidence-based public policies, addressing each problem with the ingenuity required by the challenge. But that would sound too laborious to our scriptwriters. Confronted with the enormity of the knot, they see only one option: to incense the hidden deus ex machina who will remedy all woes and mitigate all sufferings, now officially. Any spectator would feel deceived by a hackneyed plot whose only solution is a reissue of the same problem. Then, on any given Sunday, strolling casually through a sunny square during the interregnum, we’re caught off guard by a frantic commotion. A naked man rushes past us, weary but triumphant, followed by a crowd of believers railing against the evils of nudity. While we try to hide our wallets, buckle our belts tightly, and slip away with a feigned distraction, it’s hard not to let out a plaintive sigh, perhaps even involuntarily, at the eternal condition that plagues us: a nation full of metanoia gone too far with the saying that God is Brazilian.

[1] Schwarcz, L. (2019). Sobre o autoritarismo brasileiro. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.

[2] Faoro, R. (2012). Os Donos do Poder: formação do patronato político brasileiro (p. 828). São Paulo: Globo.

[3] Weber, M. (2003). Economia e Sociedade. Brasília: Editora UNB. Note: Although this concept originates from Weber, this essay does not aim to analyze the German sociologist’s thought.

[4] Wilson, B. (1975). The Noble Savages: The Primitive Origins of Charisma and Its Contemporary Survival (p. 7). Berkeley: University of California Press.

[5] Andersen, H. C. (1995). Histórias Maravilhosas de Andersen. São Paulo: Cia das Letrinhas.