BRAZILIAN SOCIETY: THE APPARENT REALITY OF LIVING, FEELING AND ACTING Josè Ribamar Tõrres Rodrigues*. *José Ribamar Tôrres Rodrigues PhD in Education from USP Master in Education from PUC / SP Internship in Teacher Training in the IUFM of DOUAI / France Former member of the State Board of Education / PI Coordinator of the State Education Forum Member of Appraisers Bank MEC / INEP e-mail: jrib.torres@gmail.com Tel. 55+86+99415 9958 Blog|: ribamartorres.blogspot.com.br SUMMARY This is a brief reflection on the spaces of the apparent reality of living, feeling and acting to which citizens transformed into subjects are subjected, based on approaches discussed by some thinkers who were included in academic training curricula, mainly in the area of human, as if they were strategies to illustrate possible “soldiers”, incorporated into an illustrated caste to reinforce and justify these processes of domination, conformation and legitimization of a continuity and exclusivity of a minority in the exercise of power, without taking care to foresee adverse consequences since these same ideas of legitimizing power trigger liberation processes. It is important to understand that to reflect social reality we need support from the ideas of authors from all eras, each with a cultural profile where representations and meaning of this reality, although revealing contrasts of time, constitute the basis not only of the apparent “evolution”. or “change” compatible more with the functionalist approach and less as the development of free thought and reflective consciousness. Therefore, it is very opportune to highlight the contributions of Michel Foucault, Ervin Goffman, Max Weber, Pierre Bourdieu, Paulo Freire, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jean Piaget, Donald Shon, John Dewey, Patrice Canivez, Clifford Geertz, Joseph A. Schumpeter, Norberto Bobbio, Maria Victória Benevides, Charles Louis Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill and others no less important. Michel Foucault is more current than ever. Social institutions, in general, try to discipline the individual to accept a project of living, feeling and wanting determined by an enlightened and colonizing minority. This power of social control constitutes a resource of social, economic and ideological power to maintain power and maintain privileges denied to the majority. The freedom to determine by very subtle means generates the guarantee of conformation and exclusion of the majority that produces and sustains this tormenting minority where all opportunities are channeled to their descendants and aggregates. It is this reality that institutions resist changing because equality is the suppression or socialization of privileges and the construction of many elites instead of a few. What defines an equal and democratic society is the existence of many elites, that is, the inclusion of everyone as part of new elites. And the more Laws, norms that limit the freedom and the individual's ability to feel and act, the less democratic it will be. Hence, institutions resort to laws as a force of power and resistance to the construction of new elites from the base of the social pyramid because democracy is a RISK. All these mechanisms of domination establish an articulated network in institutions to impede the freedom and action of active citizenship. The only question left is: Educate the citizen? (Book by Patrice Canivez). That is the question! Aren't the issues we discuss and protest produced, in large part, by the minority considered educated? Or does the majority's lack of capacity for judgment and choice not legitimize the apparent realities that favor the conformation and co-optation of citizens? It is interesting to see how the circulating and imperative ideas about society come from interest groups that control society, through institutions, highlighting the media and social media in general, with no less importance being the school (university), family and religion, all combined with a project of social conformation as a strategy of natural acceptance of the will of the domesticating minority. In the name of a social contract and democracy, institutions transform citizens into puppets where it is forbidden to think because thinking is dangerous and it is this danger that school, religion disseminate ideologies that everyone must be part of this social dramaturgy (Ervin Goffman) and in reward the majority receive awards (medals, titles, financial rewards and promises to grow in social position, status and gain privileges that will make them equal and legitimized as part of a caste that will reproduce infinitely. These are the power groups that, embedded in institutions, carry out processes of co-optation and manipulation of individuals in the name of maintaining a social contract and democracy. The turbulent times we are experiencing lead us to reflect on our role in this process of choosing political representation, which ultimately decides for us and provides, to a large extent, the secondary situations of citizenship in the fight for the interests of the various social groups and what place we occupy in the legitimization or advancement of socioeconomic and political contexts in which we live. First of all, it is necessary to highlight the relevance of the ideas of classical, Enlightenment and modern thinkers on the relationship between democracy as the foundation of the social contract, democratic discourse and the construction of active citizenship. Benevides' thinking (1991) takes us to authors such as Rousseau, Montesquieu (1979), Bobbio (1992) and Stuart Mill (1964) to endorse the institute of semi-direct democracy as a basic assumption of the necessary corrective to traditional political representation. In this aspect, Rousseau (1978) and Montesquieu (1979) raise the questions of national sovereignty and popular sovereignty, having in the representative process an alternative for correcting democracy, in the sense that « It is representation that corrects democracy »., he corrects plebiscitary deviations, discipline democracy which, left to itself, tends to be revolutionary or anarchic. It is through political parties and the legislature that democracy corrects demagoguery and ochlocracy. In this context of social relations, anti-plebiscite attitudes, dictatorship of representation as an established order and hostility between political parties and popular participation are sometimes observed. Hence, conceptions emerge that reveal ambiguities between the application of the referendum and the plebiscite, often synchronized with the history of imperial and dictatorial plebiscites. Benevides (1991), based on these thinkers already mentioned, cites the misuse of democratic institutes by governments and the questioning of the competence to convene and/or authorize these institutes as exclusive to heads of state, as well as the guarantee of freedom of information and choice of the citizen. Representation as order and stability takes us back to ancient Rome when the creation of the popular tribunate did not have the prerogatives to legislate, vote, but could veto legislative decisions. On the other hand, in England (17th century) there was parliamentary sovereignty where only those elected by the people could express political will. In the Brazilian case, the Constitution of 88 brings new institutes of popular participation as correctives to representative democracy, such as Habeas data, a popular initiative project that can be alternatives for overcoming conflicts. The authors approached point out that there is a certain incompatibility between political parties and popular representation, arguing the risks of semi-direct democracy that can lead to the weakening of parties and the emptying of legislative power. On the other hand, there are authors who argue in favor, considering that semi-direct democracy guarantees popular sovereignty and can correct possible oligarchic tendencies and argue that there is no incompatibility between referendum and representative democracy nor with the function of political parties, representing a complement to voter independence. In the Brazilian case, research shows that there is no identification between voters, party supporters, majority candidate and party programs, with personification prevailing in electoral campaigns. This fact has generated beliefs that “voters do not know how to vote”. Paul Valéry that the transition from authoritarianism to democracy was initially the « art of preventing people from taking care of what concerns them, and later became the art of compelling people to decide about things they understand nothing about », only to legitimize a status quo of interest to privileged groups. In this way, it reinforces the belief that the "people are incapable" of voting on issues that are difficult to understand in a society with an uneducated majority that tends to vote more conservatively and is subject to pressure from organized groups or economic power, leaving the tyranny of the illustrated minority. Benevides makes a counterpoint to these positions, arguing that equal incompetence occurs in representatives of the people and says that if technical capacity is not required as a requirement for candidate registration, technical capacity cannot be demanded from voters, since in representative democracy political issues are not decided by technicians, but by the parliament made up of non-specialists. For Bobbio (1992), there is a need for complementarity between direct and representative democracy and points out that among the negative aspects of representative democracy is the persistence of oligarchies, parliamentary corporatism and the lack of internal democracy within parties. The result of all this, among other consequences, is voter apathy in relation to participation in the decision-making processes of choice. In this way, Benevides defends, in addition to forms of semi-direct democracy, the improvement of institutes of political representation and electoral systems, justifying this position based on the practice of the last constituent where the parliamentary majority imposed controversial matters of interest to economically prevalent sectors against proposals for popular amendments. For Montesquieu in «The Spirit of Laws» gives the foundations of a republican democracy where political virtue translates into love for the public good and love for equality. Benevides raises the difference between political virtue and moral or religious virtue. He argues that to model citizenship it is necessary to integrate it into the set of customs of a people. It is this discussion of the importance of customs that is a central point in the thinking of Montesquieu, Tocquevelle and Rousseau. In the Brazilian tradition, says Benevides, there is more attachment to political virtues and less love for freedom, placing the principle of popular participation in the government of public affairs as a remedy against the oligarchic and patrimonial tradition and seeing customs as a significant obstacle to the legitimization of participation popular; hence, it points to political education as a condition for active citizenship in a democratic republican society. For this author, the democratization of Brazilian society depends on the possibility of changing customs and “mentalities”, considering that the institutionalization of popular participation helps people to take an interest in what concerns them. From the important points discussed above by the authors discussed, we could learn that the election, in itself, is not enough to faithfully express the popular will on all issues; the false belief that people do not know how to vote; the opposition of the technical to the political and the dissociation between political representation and social composition. Reflecting on elections as a mechanism that is not sufficient to express the popular will, under the terms of a fiduciary mandate, we take the position that such elections generate a « democratic risk » delegitimizing authoritarian practices since their representatives will feel as such (free ). The same “risk” can be attributed to the electoral practices of school democratization where the electoral process, in itself democratic, does not guarantee a democratic practice. Elected or appointed, the school director will exercise the power of command. This is an authoritative common point of both choice processes. Even because the election of the school director is insufficient to democratize it. The correction of this « risk » was, apparently, overcome with the institution of school councils, whose collegiate space, with the « participation » of the school community, incorporated authoritarian practices where the choice process legitimizes, almost always, the indication of interest groups of the school and party political power. For Maria Vioria de Mesquita Benevides, a reference professor at USP, two thousand years ago when I had the honor of being her student in the doctoral course at the Faculty of Education at USP, the belief that the people do not know how to vote serves to « discredit the efficiency of semi-direct democracy », however it does not advocate « . abolition of laws in the representation system ». This may lead us to the expansion of this belief that the people do not know how to demonstrate, the people do not know how to participate and, therefore, justify authoritarian practices and even the exclusion of popular participation. This is not reasonable to think based on the profile of elected representatives, if one concludes that the people do not know how to vote. It is understood that it is necessary to incorporate another parameter of analysis into the discussion, namely, the growing number of blank and null votes as an important form of participation that had an effect in the Brazilian parliament, which mistakenly understood blank and null votes as « apathy of the voter » instituted optional voting at sixteen (16) years of age and of the illiterate. Abstention, blank and invalid votes do not always mean protest as common sense understands, but they can indicate a strong expression of knowing how to vote in the face of the options posed or imposed for the popular referendum by vote. The technician/politician issue cannot be conceived as if the technician mastered specialized knowledge and the politician as a domain of superior knowledge, legitimized by a power that the technician does not have. Thus, the Brazilian parliament uses so-called technical committees to support decision-making in plenary. Finally, in relation to the issue of decoupling parliamentary representation from social composition, it seems possible to state that in the same proportion that voters are disconnected from their political representation and party ideals, they are also disconnected from their class representation in which some leaders representatives assume the defense of a party ideal, confusing it with class ideology when their adherents represent a specter of the ideological reality in force in the social ethos. On the other hand, this disconnection can also occur either because class entities are vulnerable to the pressures of power or because there is little ideological sense of class that links them to the ideas that represent them. Referências / References BAKHTIN. Mikhail. Marxismo e filosofia da linguagem. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1995. BENEVIDES. Maria Vitória de Mesquita. Educação para a Democracia. São Paulo: Revista Lua Nova, 1996 BOBBIO, Norberto. 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