Bolsonaro isolates himself from the rest of the world obsessed by his dangerous messianism

Among the psychiatric disorders described by a group of psychoanalysts to Folha de S. Paulo that would afflict the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, there is his messianism of wanting to resolve the drama of the coronavirus in a miraculous way. In this way, it distances itself from the global consensus of science that ensures that there is not yet any medical evidence of the cure, beyond a possible vaccine.

This messianism of the Brazilian leader and his false dilemma that it would be necessary to choose between people starving if they are isolated or the new virus can lead to a fatal mistake.

Consult other texts by JUAN ARIAS

• Bolsonaro's tears
• Tomorrow it could be too late in Brazil
• Brazilian society wakes up and says enough to Bolsonaro

In this way, the president isolates Brazil from the rest of the world, where a better way to avoid deaths from the virus has not yet been found than social isolation. National unity governments are being advised to better deal with the tragedy. The enemy that haunts the world is too strong to be played with simplistic minor policy calculations. It is time for the world to be in the hands of all the forces best prepared to face danger together, without ideological distinctions.

It is already known that all messianisms, used and abused by populist leaders of all political tendencies, are dangerous because the human being is inclined to believe in miraculous recipes. Thus, Brazilians can end up being dragged by the president's mirage, disobeying local authorities to relax isolation, as has already been seen in São Paulo and in other localities, with consequences that can be fatal.

Throughout history, false prophets have been the greatest murderers and tricksters of simple and less educated people. Playing in a country like Brazil with a heavy religious burden, with recipes offered by the shepherds to the president whom they consider anointed by God to end the plague, is to return to the obscurantism of the Middle Ages as I already recalled in another column. It is intended, as then, to replace science and medicine with messianic stamp recipes.

Insisting as Bolsonaro does in that return to sad times where religion took over science and medicine today means isolating Brazil from the rest of the world where it is science that is coming together to give the deadly disease a safe response.

Today it is clear that nothing and no one will be able to reverse the Brazilian president from his messianism. The senior military of his government are thus mistaken if they believe that it is enough for them to retouch the speeches on radio and TV networks.

We have seen how that false conversion lasts less than 24 hours for the president and immediately tunes into the so-called "Cabinet of hatred", chaired by him and his children and multiplied by social networks dominated by his small group of his most fanatical followers.

Hence the responsibility of the military present in the Government who should understand at this point that they are no longer capable of changing the psychological nature of the former captain Bolsonaro, or stopping his authoritarian outbursts.

Is it not a paradox that in the hope that Brazil can continue to be a democracy without continuous threats of authoritarian coups, it is today in the hands of the military?

That the democracy conquered in Brazil with pain and tears after the military dictatorship is today threatened by the president's totalitarian personality is no longer a secret. Nor is it that the president continues to defend and exalt dictatorship and torture, something that the best of the Army, especially the youngest, today reject and wish to forget, as this column of witnesses from the barracks has learned.

Those absolutist impetuses of the president could only be paralyzed today by the important military personnel who remain in his government and who would be wrong if they think that they are capable of stopping him. They should already understand that, in reality, the president no longer governs.

It was said when the military decided to enter a government out of the ballot box that it was a way of showing that they would respect democracy and the Constitution.

Therefore, the hope that Bolsonaro renounces a power that he no longer manages to exercise does not go so much through the long and complex liturgy of the impeachment or in legal forms of forced resignation but rather in the hope that the military is able to convince him to withdraw. for the good of the nation.

The Brazilian military has given proof after the dictatorship that they have embraced the values ​​of democracy and accepted the Constitution. And this has been understood by public opinion, which in all surveys considers the Army as one of the institutions not only democratic but among the most valued.

These are difficult and dangerous hours for a country of the importance of Brazil in world chess and, although it may seem like a paradox in a South American country, today the resolution of the government crisis that the country is undergoing and that threatens to return to dark times of authoritarianism, fall into the hands of the military.

It would be tragic if today the Brazilian public opinion also lost its confidence in this institution if it proved incapable of stopping the authoritarian outbursts of the retired former captain and who had already been expelled from the Army at a very young age. And that today he threatens even the generals of his Government, reminding him that now he is the president. And only him.

Brazil is experiencing one of those historical moments in which a miscalculation can drag the country into an adventure that one day it will have to regret.

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