Knowledge is power

There is, in people in general, a very great difficulty in understanding the world, the things that happen around them, and even what is said to them, or what is written. The representation of reality, for the vast majority of individuals, is completely different from what exists.

Those who cannot understand things as they really are may have this difficulty due to a lack of knowledge (such as young children and illiterate people), mental disabilities or, finally, due to functional illiteracy.

Let's deal here with this third group of individuals. Anyone who, despite being in full possession of their mental faculties, accepts everything they read, see and hear without reasoning, absorbs stories, ideas, news, narratives, knowledge and comments, without evaluating their veracity, their context in reality and their true objective , seeing one thing and understanding another, can be considered functionally illiterate.

Monteiro Lobato immortalized his famous phrase: “a country is made with men and books.” Because only through reading, we can expand our spectrum of vision and understand reality as it is, and not as it is told to us. Only reading can rescue us from functional illiteracy. Reading the classics, traditional writers, literature that has spanned the centuries, will give us a broad understanding of reality and will allow us to identify the fallacies that are shoved down our throats.

Blunting intelligence and preventing logical thinking is a powerful weapon of domination, as taught by Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist, who wrote his Prison Notebooks, teaching how a society implodes, dominating her from the inside out: undermining her structures of knowledge, family and religion.

If we understand that stupefying people is a natural way to control them, we will realize the importance of study for the formation of the intellect, and we will understand why real literature disappeared from the shelves of bookstores and school/university education.

It is because of this that we see fewer and fewer people capable of developing reasoning, ordered thinking, intellectuality: because for fifty years now, Brazil has found itself in this process of deconstruction of inside out. All the left that returned from exile took up residence in Universities (as professors), in politics, in the media and in the arts. And obediently, he began the process taught by Gramsci.

Aristotle said that a society is known by the music that is produced there. We are in a bad place... the musical genres and singers that are renowned and spread throughout the world, currently, do not even deserve to be commented on... young people don't know what classical music is, they have never heard of Bach, they have no idea what an opera is. And receive, through your ears, this cultural rubbish that is played out there.

This process of idiotization of society, domination of thought and annihilation of intellectual authority is seen all over the world, and was very well explained by Flavio Gordon in his book, The Corruption of Intelligence. There he describes, step by step, the attempt to destroy conservatism, the pillars of society, and the implementation of a new era of thought.

If we look at the current discourses on gender neutrality in language, this is easily evident. In Hitler's Germany, language was being modified, giving different meanings to certain expressions and words, so that the population was convinced about the correctness of the strategies applied by Nazism, and their necessity, to protect the common good. Changing language and its scope is a very important step in dominating society. After all, what is more powerful than transforming thoughts?

When we analyze the brainwashing that communism and Nazism implemented in places where these government regimes were fully applied, the corruption of the population's intelligence becomes clear, through lying narratives , which were absorbed by the community.

For this reason, and the possibility of learning from past mistakes, present in history, our best defense is attack. We need to invest everything in quality education, in intelligence organized for integral knowledge and in the search for truth. Only in this way can we ward off evil, pursue good and see things as they are.

Knowledge is power. Whoever masters strategies and knows the right time to attack wins the war, as Sun Tzu said in The Art of War. We live in a war against Intelligence, which affects the entire world. Entire generations are being deprived of learning the moral and spiritual values that matter and order society. No wonder, emptiness and depression settled among us. Let's start? It's past time, but there's still time!!!!

We can use our year-end promises, including this one: I want to become smarter!