Lies and the Power of Intellectuals (Olavo de Carvalho)

Lies and the Power of Intellectuals (Olavo de Carvalho)

A disturbing phenomenon of contemporary Brazilian pseudoculture is the excessive importance—bordering on idolatry—granted to a weak and crippled thinker like Antonio Gramsci. Recently, a major São Paulo newspaper, perhaps unaware that for thirty years this Italian ideologue has been the most read and venerated author among the local left, announced over six festive pages the reissue of his works as if it were a fiat lux destined to renew Brazilian thought from top to bottom. It is like saying that Hebe Camargo is revolutionizing the style of variety shows. Not even Jorge Amado, who is a national darling, or Gilberto Freyre, our most internationally renowned thinker, can compete with the founder of the Italian Communist Party in the number of academic theses dedicated to his works by Brazilian university students.
However, Gramsci did not have a single idea that was not already circulating, in a better and more consistent version, in the European intellectual environment of his time. All he did was orchestrate, using commonplaces, a new set of pretexts for the exercise of political Machiavellianism with a clear conscience—that is, with false consciousness. Almost all his doctrines fall beneath the level of strict philosophical discussion, as they mix inextricably simple technical errors in argumentation, deficient historical information, and a collection of blind spots projected by unconscious motivations, which can only be “analyzed” in the psychoanalytic sense of the term. Every serious examination of Gramsci’s thought begins in logic and ends in psychology; one attempts to understand the foundations of a thesis and ends up wondering what peculiar forma mentis allowed an adult man to believe in something so foolish.
For example, when Gramsci proclaims that “philosophy is an intellectual order, something religion cannot be,” we ask how it was possible for a man born in such a religious country to ignore that all theology is necessarily a totalizing intellectual order—something that philosophy rarely manages to be, and which since Kant most philosophers claim it shouldn’t even try to be. Any minimal study of the history of ideas suffices to show that the very notion of an intellectual system as understood in the modern West was an invention of the Church. At that point, we give up probing the foundations of an opinion that has no foundation whatsoever, and begin asking how a total lack of knowledge about a subject can coexist in the same brain with the sensation of absolute confidence when speaking about it. We are left unsure whether Gramsci was simply a fool or only pretending to be one. In the second and more charitable hypothesis, we end up wondering whether, by proclaiming the opposite of an elementary historical truth, he imagined he could deceive anyone better informed than a mass of workers with no time to study. In either case, we must recognize that we are dealing with a case of intellectual pathology, of total disinterest in truth—even in the purely historical and factual sense of the term. And Gramsci’s philosophy loses all interest, while the “Gramsci case” becomes very interesting for the scholar of the perversions of the human soul.
The examples could multiply endlessly. This is not the place to enumerate them, but (pause for commercials) those interested will find a periodically updated collection of them on my homepage, where I have inaugurated a section dedicated to dismantling, fiber by fiber, the cardboard castle built by an unlucky politician and amateur philosopher. Whatever subject he casts his gaze upon, Gramsci projects over it a monumental scotoma, a blind area formed partly by prejudice, partly by misinformation, and partly by the mixture of both—that is, by the providentially selective ignorance of precisely those things one must ignore in order to believe what he is saying.
Despite these monstrous optical distortions, it is certain that part of human society functions exactly as Gramsci describes it. Which part? Well, the militant intelligentsia, of course. It functions the way Gramsci says it does, not only for the rather obvious reason that the people in it have read Gramsci and are doing what he suggests, but because the entire Gramscian system is a rationalization of the power ambitions of that category of beings created by the illusory expansion of higher education: the “intellectual proletariat,” as Otto Maria Carpeaux called it—the masses of pseudo-educated graduates who find no useful role in society and one fine day discover, with thinly veiled relief, that instead of killing themselves they can simply invent a new society in their own image and likeness, where the toads will become princes and vice versa; that is, where everyone who is not like them will feel as bad as they do today. Signs of what that new society will be are already more than visible in the contemporary world—and it is, spitting image, the face of Antonio Gramsci.
Gramsci did not believe in objective knowledge. Influenced by pragmatism, he saw science, the arts, and culture merely as expressions of collective desires and as instruments to fulfill those desires. The difference between him and common pragmatists is that, for him, the active subject of knowledge—or rather, of action—is not just anyone, an ordinary flesh-and-blood citizen, but that collective entity which, among intimates, is affectionately nicknamed the Party, or the Club. Proletarian in intention or imagination, the Club is essentially composed of intellectuals, and the role of intellectuals—whether they are members of the Club or of the opposing team—is not to produce knowledge in the sense of a description or understanding of reality, but rather to produce a legitimizing discourse of class interests. Of which class? That’s where Gramscian intellectuals reveal themselves to be the most astonishing of creatures. Under capitalism, they must “occupy spaces” and secure for the Party (or whatever name it bears) hegemony—that is, control over the conscious and unconscious mental activity of the population. Once that is done, the transition to socialism occurs without major trauma, and they assume official control of a society they were already unofficially commanding. Now, a class that dominates the soul of capitalism and governs socialism is, without a doubt, very powerful. Therefore, when Gramsci says that intellectual activity consists in producing legitimizing discourses of class interests, it seems inevitable to conclude that the class capable of ruling under two regimes must possess the best self-legitimizing discourse. Yet, that is not what Gramsci says. The intellectual class has no discourse in its own interest. It speaks only in the name of capitalists or proletarians. Isn’t that a miracle? The self-legitimizing discourse is an essential instrument of power, yet the class that subtly dominates capitalism and overtly controls the state under socialism doesn’t need to have one—it doesn’t need to say anything in its own interest.
It may appear to be a logical contradiction in the doctrine, but in truth it’s something worse.
The Gramscian intellectual is indeed the one who exercises hegemony today, governmental power tomorrow, always claiming that he is not in charge, but rather that the capitalists or proletarians are. It is not merely a logical flaw: it is an existential falsehood. For in the real order of things, the capitalist under capitalism and the proletarian under socialism are reduced to the helpless condition of pretext suppliers, passive servants of a strategy they need not even understand and which, nevertheless, is carried out in their name and under their moral responsibility. Naturally, in service of this cause, each gives what he has: the capitalist contributes the money, the proletarian his labor power. The intellectual contributes the decisions—and still says that they were the ones who made them. The idiots believe it and are willing to help a little more. That is why, under capitalism, the capitalist classes can pour rivers of money into funding a socialist culture whose explicit content opposes them, while under socialism the proletarian masses consent to be enslaved and reduced to misery in the name of an ideology whose explicit content is supposedly in their favor. Hovering above both these collectives of suckers, mysterious and unreachable behind the smoke like a giant octopus, is the class of Gramscian intellectuals. If it does not have a self-legitimizing discourse, so much the better—for by speaking in the name of others, it can always act in its own interest and become ever more domineering, while the audience keeps imagining that everything is a struggle between capitalist and proletarian interests. Power, said René Guénon, is invisible by definition.
When a situation becomes chaotic to the point of defying all human understanding and seeming like a demonic darkness, it is because someone is lying, because some fundamental fact has been concealed from public discussion. None of the contemporary confusion can be explained without this decisive factor, which is the essential lie of our time: the selfish interest of intellectuals disguised as the ideology of others. The activist intellectuality, which dominates the channels that shape mentality—from psychotherapy offices to UNESCO, passing through all the senior positions in the media and countless NGOs that meddle in everything—lives and prospers under the protective shadow of a class struggle discourse where the only victorious class never appears in the ring. And the more it reads Antonio Gramsci, persuading itself that it is nothing but a humble servant of capitalists or proletarians, the closer it comes to the perfection of invisibility, which is becoming invisible to itself. This is the reason for Antonio Gramsci’s success: the Gramscian intellectual is the subject who can begin his career as a manipulator of childish consciences in a primary school and reach the imperial heights of a Stalin or a Fidel Castro, without ever having to be aware that he has done anything for his own benefit.
An ideology like this is the most powerful conscience analgesic ever put on sale in the market of universal depravity. For complicated and conflicted subjects, as intellectuals often are in their youth, it is exactly what the devil ordered. Antonio Gramsci is the Santa Claus of sick souls in need of a salvific self-deception.