Conversas do Mundo - Leonardo Boff e Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Leonardo is a very great joy to be here in this paradisiacal place so that we can talk and have a conversation about the world, a conversation about the world and then I am going to ask him and Leonardo asks me and we both talk about some topics that concern us both. and I thank you very much for the wonderful hospitality of being here and being able to do this work. So what's the idea? I currently have a European project and this project is quite the sign of the times in Europe because it is a project in which they told me that I should compete with the idea that it would give me more pleasure to study and then I said and Europe after five centuries of colonialism and capitalism for me Europe is the Europe that created colonialism and capitalism because there are other Europes there are other Europes within Europe our Immigrants and all the children of descendants who came from North Africa who came from Africa and what are the other Europes I am talking about the dominant Europe that was the one that led colonialism and capital Europe at the end of the 2nd century has nothing to teach the world, in fact, sometimes due to the current crisis, which is just a symptom, it cannot solve a crisis after five centuries of trying to solve the entire world crisis, cannot solve its crisis and then, On the other hand, colonialism was incapable of learning from the world's experience and I would say that Europe completed its historical cycle, exhausted its possibilities and carried out the project it had, which in a certain way was great, on the one hand, a project of technoscience, on the other hand, a more humanistic project of autonomy of rights, these are realities that we cannot lose now, I think we no longer It has internal capabilities with its own resources to get out of the crisis in which it finds itself. has stagnated, which is an agonizing crisis, that is, it has completed its cycle and I believe that it has the capacity to renew itself to the extent that it overcomes its intrinsic arrogance of being a cultural reference in the world, etc., so it is a system closed and opening ourselves as an open system and dialoguing with the world, we here in Latin America in some way are the extreme west uhum we have roots in Europe we cannot deny it my grandparents are Italian immigrants, we brought that culture, on the other hand, we are rooted here in such a way that I feel Brazilian, the Brazilian stomach was able to digest cultures and people that came from 60 different countries, but there is a huge movement and I am happy that they have captured that, showing that America America is experiencing a democracy that Europe has not done until now and that we are creating out of our own desperation.

I always say that liberation is born from the Lasqueira of life. People are obliged to look for paths and today we have the courage to look for them. Before they were soon repressed of course and we had a castrating superg that prevented us from thinking through our heads doing our tests today we are not even proud of doing it let's make our own way discovering a type of development that is not devastating for nature although much of this is still being But we realized what is not the way out there. We have to make our own way.

But well, Leonardo I think and I agree that really today in Latin America we may be witnessing this. Now I ask: What are the conditions that made this possible? because normally the idea that we have and that we are seeing is that in the early 2000s, in fact it begins with Hugo Chaves in 1998, we are going to see a set of progressive governments in Latin America that are very different from each other, obviously, but that will bring interesting experiences, which is to maintain, let's say, not question the neoliberal model of Eurocentric development, but to achieve greater social redistribution, Brazil at this moment exactly with this developmentalism that we now call activism because we are once again exporting nature and Brazil with such an Industrial dynamic big, its dynamic is in the minerals, it is in the agricultural frontier, that is, in the countryside, it is not in the industry, let's say, this is also being done in an almost neocolonial way, what is happening with the indigenous peoples, with the populations, Afro-descendants, how is it possible?

In other words, what we have to ask ourselves is if this model, which is a locomotive, everything that appears on the road is to massacre the indigenous people, development, how are we going to solve this problem, one of the questions that worries me? You say it repeatedly, I don't think so, B adventure, You're right. In this context, say Latin American geopolitics, a certain void in the American presence here led to more autonomous states and the greatness of De Chávez is one of the few in the world who is explicitly anti-imperialist. , that if the majority adjusts to the empire, avoids it now, I think it is an element of Boaventura that I consider of great importance and that is at the base of these new political experiences, the effervescence, the irruption of the poor in history since From the 1950s onwards, there was an articulation of all the social movements of indigenous peoples of Afro-descendants and peasant women, and the greatness of this movement was that it was a social movement with social power made at the base, organizing itself as best as it could, and managed to channel itself towards a uhum political power found in the case of Brazil very clear created the PT This was a creation of the bases I remember Our community of bases that are 100,000 in Brazil almost 1 and a half years ago millions of people in biblical circles said that we need to create our weapon politics to carry out our dreams we did not join the PT we founded the PT in Europe, the young people are on the street, I mean, the street, as I often say, is the only public space in Europe that is not yet colonized by the markets financial, so the institutions are closed to the people, they think there is a risk, this is a great lesson for Europe and for the world it is not, but there may be a risk that these forms of participation that were so rich In the last decade there has also been a certain regression here, we have to be attentive in this sense and I think that this reversal is difficult because a collective consciousness has been created that the great man is us, we are tired of voting for our oppressors, We decided, we decided to vote for ourselves, that is, we voted for Lula uhum, we voted for the PT and we say that this is our achievement and we will never hand over our figures to the bourgeoisie. uhum charismatic our social movement so there is this consciousness of autonomy even in front of the State then it is a citizenship I would say almost every day that is recreated through participation Because without participation there is no citizenship so the strong point, at least in the part of Brazil that I know a little about Central America is the network of social movements in a thousand ways that communicate and exchange experiences, this creates an awareness that one plus one weak plus one weak are not two weak ones, it is one strong and greatness.

What I think about this movement is that it has a very active social practice and at the same time it has its bodies of Thinkers of thinkers that accompany it, who are people from the Anoric people who are not us. I enter through the back door. I was polite. at Pharaoh's school an ally of theirs entered through the back door I listen as much as I can I am there I give my name when the police were there they wore the Franciscan habit to avoid being arrested and they couldn't arrest them because they wanted a problem by arresting a priest, even so, Saint Francis, I cannot.

I agree with this reading. The only problem I see in it, which ultimately must also be your problem, is that we achieved it and I also often see myself as what I usually say, I am not an avant-garde intellectual, I am a back-office intellectual, I will listen, a facilitator, I am a facilitator, I am often the spokesperson, as Leonardo is. rarely, and therefore almost ventrilodic, many times for people who have no voice, and we are in some way now helping the institutionality that was created in the popular movement, which seems extraordinary to me, it had a problem of scale, it is That is to say, we democratized a lot of local politics, and I think that is one of the bottlenecks that this social force has when it is transformed into a political force, which cannot put wedges in the system or very few now.

I think that since these movements manage to place representatives there who are not corrupt and who maintain a permanent organization with the base, I see in many meetings of ministers that they invite popular leaders to discuss and they are the ones who make the most speeches, the most beautiful speeches. because they don't say words, they say things. I remember a recent meeting with the Minister of Human Rights in Rio de Janeiro and it was great when the popular leaders began to talk about what this pacification that was made in Rio de Janeiro means. Contradictions like these, the military takes advantage of raping girls to obtain advantages and they violently opposed saying that the underlying problem was not resolved that way, but the minister was surprised that she was hearing these things more and more.

With this happening in the country, we have achieved some victories that are significant in terms of social distribution and not only here in Brazil, in other Latin American countries, we have achieved a lot in the field of diversity policy, the recognition of diversity , it is the country of affirmative actions by quotas of the National Council of Education finally show the racial stereotypes of the Cazas de Pedrinho do Monteiro Lobato is that we have a special system for indigenous education, quilombola education gives me the impression that the logic of power makes all the concessions While how they do not touch their money in accumulation when it comes to things that have in front of them the great mining rights now there in Belo Monte all the meeting in the Xingu region when the indigenous peoples stand in the way of the agribusiness there is violence in the countryside it is extraordinary why this democracy because we cannot and overcome this idea that is extrajudicial, that is, it is not a rule of law, violence in the countryside already 43 Leaders have murdered indigenous people since 2012, according to data from simi, what are these restrictions like where, on the one hand, there is so much positive side and, on the other, that worrying and very dark side of an extremely violent accumulation of No Rules that basically fixes pacts in one way or another? with the federal government, fundamentally based on the idea that we guarantee development, more revenue, more income for the state plus family allowance but patience we have to sacrifice the indigenous people I think it is a profound misunderstanding of society and I even create important excerpts from the government that is an indigenous ethnic group uhum level as numerically and do not realize the richness of cultural diversity that are languages ​​that are traditions that are myths that are people who show another way of being human uhum we can be humans like Tupis guaraníes like eh Yanomami do not need to be human like us white Europeans o o and here is M genad so that does not enter now.

From the moment we realize this quality we have a lot to learn from them and today it is urgent to revisit it because they teach us to treat the nature, does not enter a forest without greeting the plants, without apologizing to the flowers, without entering into communion with the birds and animals, ask for permission and enter the forest, this reverence does not mean lowering a tree without doing a ritual saying, let's lower it because we need to. make a door a Remo but we are going to plant four five we have totally lost this reverence me lisses there is a saying that comes from the indigenous people that when the white man comes with the ax and knocks down the big trees before falling the tree looks to one side and sheds a tear saying the handle of this ax is made of my body it is wood Uhum And that wood is knocking down the water ex but it is this idea that until now we have seen the Guaraní Caiová of Mato Grosso do Sul and that they have been expelled ​​of their lands for agribusiness and who threaten collective suicide, that is what we call, they themselves say collective suicide and in fact when they ask for the tractor it is the tractor that comes to bury them because they do not want to leave their land, neither alive nor dead, it's not ex, now this is a suicide, eh, in a little while we will get more into theology, but is this a suicide or is it a sacrifice, I think that Buenaventura is a kind of cry of indignation against this culture that kills them .

And then they have a founding myth of their own in the case of the Guaraní Caiová. I think it's worth saying in this interview. in our dialogue why the entry of the whites who deforested everything took away their lands, created large agribusinesses, killed their fundamental sense of life, what is their fundamental sense that all the Guaraní Caiová indigenous people and others too, because they are different ethnic groups, will reach the heaven, but they reach heaven the day they died after several incarnations if they incarnate in a Jaguar they incarnate in any animal until they incarnate in an ant and the ant climbs the Tree to the top and from there takes it to heaven and they say take us away our trees take away our lands we will never reach heaven we are lost so life has no meaning and they kill themselves in protest and the government is useless that the government send Freudian Jungian psychoanalysts there to see their level of depression they have to do agrarian reform, delimit the land , replant, reforest, solve your problem Well Leonardo Cá we are discussing the possibilities of the world learning from itself because the problem is often not that the south learns from the north or from civil disobedienceWe encounter exceptional situations where the constitutions and the established powers are totally incapable of managing.

I don't know if the correct word is managing a crisis of planetary proportions. For me it was very illuminating, a book by Jaques Zali, who was Mitterran's great advisor. or a brief history of time, paints three scenarios that I find interesting: the super empire that is in decline, but that will be followed by super violence, so it is a kind of world and we are somehow witnessing regional wars for reasons economic as in North Africa political reasons for freedoms, etc. that are gaining scale to the point of using chemical weapons of mass destruction, eventually small atomic bombs that are small pieces that destroy an entire Petropolis and are not very destructive but make the entire Region uninhabitable for about 30 years, due to the irradiation that Let's say that at a time like this when humanity realizes that it can self-destruct in this rise, the third scenario of Superdemocracy will be created, which would be planetary democracy.

Uhum, a collective management not centralized but shared of this planet with the resources it has and with that we must be content with giving the minimum to everyone but not only to everyone as a whole as well as to life plants animals other living beings organisms and then it would be one would be let's say the great transition for humanity although it ends with saying And I am agnostic and now I need to pray for this to happen because there is no guarantee that this will happen. The problem is that for many people change is darkness.

Socialism was clearly the great horizon of transformation and utopia, and in Rosa Luxemburg's time we began to make a difference between socialism and barbarism, which is why Rosa Luxemburg sees that, after all, the transformation of the world can go in a direction of catastrophe that will be barbaric or socialist, but you have to have a lot of courage so that it is not barbaric. What worries me most today is that the scenario of socialism has disappeared, at least. For the moment, although we talk about socialism of the 20th century, it seems too much to me with socialism of the 20th century, it really does not have much credibility and barbarism in my opinion.

It advances in the way that there is no alternative, therefore it is more capitalism and more capitalism and more exploitation in sociology we have always had some resistance to the concept of the people why Because the idea that after all, who the people are does not have a transcendental dimension, the people of God or whatever the people are are the oppressors and the oppressed and on the other hand the idea of ​​People is closely linked to the ideas of populism and charismatic leaders and the denial of party politics and democracy However, it is an absolutely fundamental concept in theology and especially in liberation theology, because not all peoples are Brazilian or it is a topic that liberation theologians work on with sociologists and political scientists, we strive to refine that category and convert it into an instrument of knowledge because, first of all, the theology of Latin America, derived from the Vatican, places it as the real definition of the church, people of God uhum I mean, the people are there, people, etc., but it is a highly ideological concept since Nazism, FKS, republican FKS, kir, etc. ., then we remove this connotation and arrive at this: people, in fact, there is no people, they are a creation, they are created from the poor and marginalized who organize themselves and create their network of connections from which they develop a project of life, a worldview project of society, etc. and as they establish these networks, a people is being born as a sociological category, so in terms of Brazil, the Brazilian people are being born, they do not yet exist, but if the people are something more than parties, non-governmental organizations and social movements, we return to Espinoza's concept of multitude, which was later recovered by Father Tony Negre and, basically, in the idea of ​​Are these masses, so to speak?

To speak, who are the dispossessed who in some way can make the revolution, they are no longer the workers, they are everyone, they are the unemployed, they are the oppressed, I believe that yes, yes, there are a multiplicity of mechanisms of oppression, which today are many. more visible in the world when before we mainly saw the pressure that we call exploitation which is Capital, today there are other forms of work that have become very visible but they all require forms of organization eh We need the concept of People in addition to the concept of social movements of non-governmental organizations and popular parties Why is it the concept of the people?

It is a concept that seems inert in its concept in the way he says it, it is a being that creates itself, a design of itself. It is something that builds itself from itself with some authenticity, but this design of itself cannot really lead to the idea of ​​a fox geist and Fox essence, etc. which in some way could be disguised or perverted into a form of authoritarianism I am a little afraid of the concept of people I am not afraid of the people but I am afraid of the concept of people of the concept of People now if I continually refer to the source of what What comes is that it is the Uhum community that functions, integrates, resolves conflicts internally, finds ways to articulate with others who are not people who are disarticulated down there and the whole common tendency is to relate upwards with organized society with citizens, etc. and forget yourself down there.

The Challenge of Christians is to try and it is not the transcendence of the trances to go deeper and rescue those who are more organized, the ruling class, therefore it is a people, but it does not have a community, it does. I don't have a community, a feeling of belonging, collective interests, a project, a memory, a history, it's not there, it's a congregation based on even perverse objectives, right? I have been living with this for a long time, this anguish. , it was also cutting-edge knowledge and my aspiration is to be an ignorant person enlightened to an ignorant person.

Let's say it, huh. And that's what I think we can have. For this I come with the concept of ecology. of the knowledge of intercultural translation because it shows the limits of thinking and of each of the paradigms in which we work and the need to integrate different knowledge because before you mentioned a great advance in going to the Moon, I think that if we want to go to Lua it needs science, but if you want to preserve biodiversity you need indigenous knowledge, peasant knowledge, therefore, different knowledge for different objectives and therefore we have to be very sure of these objectives.

What is our role? We're not exactly organic Grams intellectuals and I mean. about the rearguard intellectual how Leonardo Bof sees himself in this circumstance as an intellectual and as an activist deep down as well, which is, look, I see it in two aspects, Boaventura and I think that you, from my perspective, and maybe you Don't even say it like that but you think you act this way and I think that the role of the intellectual, I understand myself a little like that in my activity, is someone who assumes an ethical responsibility so ethics is very important uhum like ethics of values ​​ethics of denial of what is being destroyed in terms of the life of the relationships between people and communities and peoples, then someone who puts themselves at the service of life Uhum And this with ethical value, it is not a thing of biology, nothing as an ethical value and in the classic sense of the Greeks when they talk about eos they think of the house but not of the house as a Building uhum the house as that part of nature that I reserve to be able to live in it with meaning to relate to others thus an existential sense of home I think that the intellectual and he has to be a fundamental intellectual in my understanding of awakening these feelings that are of human radicality in his listeners no, what he proposes now I will raise because this does not awaken Uhum he has to awaken in the way of articulating the discourse of relating, creating deep down a hope in the world against all hope and as an effect it has to be an increase in the enthusiasm of the desire to live and it is worth living, let us move forward even though we know that reality is bad and then Block is very, very brilliant when he says that Genesis is at the end, not the beginning.

I can't help but miss this opportunity to tell you that Leonardo often goes to Europe and talks to Europeans, those who invite them, eh, but there are many Europes, right? Those who are excluded from this European are these young people 50% unemployed in Spain 40% in Portugal 50% in Greece people without job prospects or a life worthy of precarious work, etc. If Leonardo could address them, what message would he give them? What I would like today in Europe and those who dominate and also those who are outraged in the street because I know that Leonardo knows and one of his great characteristics is knowing how to talk to people. who are in power to show their bad conscience and give hope to those who are oppressed by them, because Europe at this moment is going through this crisis in which it obviously needs to learn from other experiences in the world, what do you think Europe is not learning?

And what should I learn from the experiences that Leonardo has lived on this continent and in the world? Who do you think would be most important for them to know about themselves that they don't like? That does not mean that they do not applaud at the end, but that Leonardo tells them certain truths that perhaps I do not like to hear, I think that sometimes when it is a great challenge we keep quiet and meditate, but it is always possible. I'll say a few words. I think that especially young people should never give up on their dreams, they have to keep dreaming, which is the source of their energy.

Protesting, not accepting, rejecting a certain type of society and not wanting to enter. That's how it is and it is only possible through a Generous dream that another type of coexistence is possible, another type of social organization different from the one you are founding. And it is worth producing an ocean of suffering in families, suicides, unemployment, we talk about unemployment, but behind it is desperation in families and I end with the testimony of a German journalist who visited me and covered the main conflict zones in the world and wanted to visit a popular festival and I took one to a community there in Rio de Janeiro where the party was Lio's Friday, beer on tap, everyone was socializing, the German appeared, everyone offered to drink, he sat next to him, started crying and said look, I pray to God that the day I die I want to die like this people with fraternization if they recognized themselves as German they knew three words in Portuguese how they speak Portuguese well and invited to dance samba invited to enter this is fraternity is humanity I wanted a world like this and when I die I want to die in the middle like this because this is the beginning of the new Maravilha I think that's it, it's over, we're done, I think it was a wonderful conversation and I think now you can take the plans wherever you want And then and tomorrow