Against mediocrity, against identitarism

a contribution to brazilian public and academic debate

Abstract

In Brazil, identitarianism is an influential flow of opinion largely propagated into Universities and the press. It is so unrooted in the professors’ and journalists’ head that its premises and political agenda seem to constitute a sort of culture, a very spread vocabulary which define the most part of public debates. This text has two aims. First, to criticize the identitarian movements by showing some of their premises and performances and by associating them to the national mediocrity: an elites’ historic trend to maintain Brazilian people in a low level of qualification, capacitation and prosperity. The identitarianism’s aspects that make them an extension and an update of mediocrity are their anti-national and anti-institutional contents. The second aim is to point out to the core of national problems, derisively ignored by Brazilian identitarians, in the manner how institutions are imagined and designed. If our intuitions and arguments are rights, the main topic of a national public debate agenda must be eliminating the mediocrity, and not to perpetuate it, by uplifting an idea of nation through a huge engagement to imagine and construct institutions.