THE GREAT BRAZILIAN DISHEARTENMENT

   When decent people bow passively to indecency, we live a paradox

Image: AI-AFPP

By Antonio Fernando Pinheiro Pedro

“The somber dawn of our present day, when we are no longer capable of enduring our own immorality, nor accepting the remedies capable of curing it.”  

Titus Livius

There’s a deep exhaustion hanging over Brazil — a kind of disheartenment that isn’t just emotional, but civilizational. It’s as if the entire nation is too drained to react, too resigned to feel outrage, too numb to notice the moral abyss opening beneath its feet.

The average Brazilian, crushed by a routine of endless crises and forced to witness the daily display of luxury produced by — and for — the most abject characters, seems to have found in convenient cowardice a way to survive.

People don’t confront anything anymore: not injustice, not abuse, not crime, not corruption. Everything gets tolerated. Everything gets normalized. Everything gets brushed off with a shrug, a cynical remark, an empty joke, or a hypocritical excuse.

Injustice has become scenery.  

Crime has become statistics.  

Corruption has become a method.  

Moral decay has become habit.

A silent, almost comfortable numbness is spreading among us — one that turns tragedies into entertainment and outrage into memes. We’ve grown accustomed to the absurd with the same ease we swipe a phone screen or change the channel.

Human misery — intellectual, ethical, spiritual — spreads like a thick fog, suffocating any remaining sense of collective responsibility.

Ignorance grows at the same pace that duty disappears. Moral values dissolve in the sewage of a shallow culture incapable of distinguishing right from wrong — only what’s convenient from what’s inconvenient. A collective of mediocre people, self‑absorbed or hypnotized by the mediocrity around them.

We’ve become a nation that seems to have given up on itself. A country watching its own decline with the passivity of someone sitting through a bad movie, too apathetic to turn off the screen or leave the theater.

The great Brazilian disheartenment isn’t just sadness. It’s surrender. It’s resignation. It’s the dangerous feeling that nothing is worth fighting for — and therefore nothing needs to be defended.

That’s the moment when barbarism settles in. After all, when a society loses its capacity for indignation, it also loses its capacity for self‑preservation.

In this century, we tried to change this state of affairs. But the swarm of mediocrities rushed back to seize the helm, steering the ship straight toward tragedy. And no outsider would dare help a people who allow themselves to be governed by fools.

Karl Popper taught that unlimited tolerance leads to the disappearance of tolerance itself, because it allows the intolerant to exploit it and destroy the open society and its institutions. That’s Brazil’s situation: defeated by permissiveness, we’ve become victims of a perverse, diseased state of affairs.

Conclusion: we’ve reached the paradox of decency. Nothing remains but to cut out the cancer — or surrender to it, “listening to an Argentine tango.”

Antonio Fernando Pinheiro Pedro is a lawyer (University of São Paulo), journalist, and institutional and environmental consultant. He is the founding partner of Pinheiro Pedro Advogados law firm and director of AICA – Corporate and Environmental Intelligence Agency . He served on the Green Economy Task Force of the International Chamber of Commerce, was a professor at the Barro Branco Military Police Academy, and a lecturer at NISAM — the Information and Environmental Health Center at the University of São Paulo. He has worked as a consultant for UNICRI — the United Nations Interregional Crime Research Institute, as well as for UNDP, the World Bank, and the IFC. He is a member of the Brazilian Institute of Lawyers (IAB), the Superior Council for National Studies and Policy at FIESP — the Federation of Industries of the State of São Paulo, and Vice President of the São Paulo Press Association. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Ambiente Legal portal and curator of the blog The Eagle View.