Orwell às voltas na campa: da adesão ao discurso vigente ou a história da narrativa da crise

Já muito se falou daquele que é o habitual discurso do nosso governo, dos partidos da coligação e dos actores mais ou menos dispersos (ou dissimulados) pelos meios de comunicação social que os apoiam. A famosa e muito ridicularizada "narrativa" de que falou José Sócrates no seu regresso voluntário aos média nacionais não foi só uma desculpa para se fazer de incompreendido, foi também uma constatação do quão moldado está a ser o pensamento dos portugueses (e não só).

É comum a todos os momentos eleitorais ou de especial tensão política e ideológica este investimento numa forma de analisar as situações que insinue conclusões gerais o mais próximas possível do que convém a cada grupo. Não haja aqui contemplações, grande parte dos "actores" políticos está longe de querer ajudar as pessoas a compreender os meandros e os pormenores das situações que comentam. O objectivo primordial é convencer as pessoas de que este ou aquele está "certo" ou de que é o mais preocupado com a situação que fala ao coração do eleitor. Atenção que não digo que isto seja simplesmente por má vontade ou má fé, há que ter em conta que a maioria dos portugueses não tem cultura geral e muito menos conhecimentos específicos que lhe permita perceber a fundo a generalidade das questões discutidas (provavelmente um dos nossos maiores problemas).

No entanto, o que tem ocorrido nos últimos anos parece-me ir além do habitual - o que talvez se deva a estar a vivê-lo por dentro e atentamente - pelo que, ao ouvir há pouco tempo uma pessoa desempregada a dizer que nunca viveu "acima das suas possibilidades", resolvi organizar as minhas ideias e tentar dar algum contributo para a análise desta situação. Nesse sentido vou tentar passar ao lado das habituais picardias inter-partidárias, com o atirar de culpas aos que governaram anteriormente e queixas de falta de colaboração e sentido de responsabilidade, excepto quando relevantes para a discussão. Quero concentrar-me no que me parece especialmente grave no momento em que vivemos: o discurso orwelliano sobre a crise, a troika, o ajustamento e sobre as suas relações por um lado com o estado social e, por outro, com a culpabilização individual.

Os exemplos de doublethink e newspeak são tantos que nem vou tentar fazer uma listagem exaustiva. Seguem-se casos que bastam para ilustrar esta situação.

Do programa eleitoral ao memorando da troika, das gorduras aos sacrifícios, do controlo do défice pela despesa à busca pelo milagre económico:

Ainda na oposição, Pedro Passos Coelho (PPC) colocou-se contra o malfadado PEC-4 por ser demasiado punitivo para os portugueses. Depois do seu partido negociar, em conjunto com o PS e o CDS, o memorando de entendimento com a troika, passou as eleições a proclamar uma série de coisas que vale a pena lembrar: que estava bem preparado, que sabia do que o país precisava, que não iria aumentar impostos ou que não reduziria os subsídios de férias/natal. Iniciou a governação a dizer que afinal o país estava muito mal e que o seu programa era o programa da troika e que se pudesse o levaria "mais além". Enquanto a farsa da culpabilização do país pegou (a discutir abaixo), a conversa manteve-se nesta linha, mas com a descredibilização deste discurso de arranque e principalmente com o abandono de Vítor Gaspar e a demissão "irrevogável" de Paulo Portas (PP), a conversa deu uma grande volta. Afinal, a troika é muito má, o memorando é uma imposição que o PSD nem queria ou da qual não gosta mas que no fundo ainda acredita que vai funcionar. Portanto, de repente o programa da troika já não é uma perfeita panaceia, mas ainda é um bom tratamento para o problema de um país que depende de terceiros para o financiamento básico. Fica isolada como principal motivação para tudo isto a confiança dos mercados. Cumprir o memorando de entendimento e nomeadamente as metas de redução do défice passam a ser a única opção para manter a confiança de quem nos empresta dinheiro, enquanto esperamos que a economia recupere. Neste momento começa-se a reconhecer a importância da economia, do produto interno, para pagar a dívida e poder equilibrar o orçamento (até aqui o nosso problema era puramente gasto a mais e nunca produto a menos), mas mantém-se a preponderância do corte na despesa. Quem ouve o governo agora, nomeadamente o irrevogável demitido agora vice-PM, não fica a perceber nada do que se passou até aqui. Diz-se agora que o que importa é o milagre económico, que só com crescimento é que vamos pagar as dívidas, reequilibrar o orçamento, recuperar a soberania financeira. Portanto, o governo que começou por dizer que a única coisa que era necessário era cortar os gastos a mais do estado, "as gorduras" do despesismo socialista, que dizia que não se podia tentar investir na economia porque isso aumentaria a despesa, e depois que não havia alternativa aos cortes, que andávamos a viver acima das nossas possibilidades, vem agora "admitir" que a nossa esperança está na economia. Isto, claro, porque se pode agarrar a meia dúzia de indicadores que apontam para um abrandamento da nossa auto-destruição ou até mesmo um possível início de crescimento económico.
Com isto não quero dizer que as várias ideias acima enumeradas não sejam frequentemente compatíveis, em especial considerando a complexidade da economia de um país e da crise que vivemos; quero no entanto chamar à atenção para a forma como o governo e seus porta-vozes se agarram a cada pormenor, a cada objectivo como se fosse a sua única bandeira, como nunca tentam fazer um discurso integrador e explicativo e, principalmente, como nunca admitem que estavam errados. Ao jeito do partido de 1984 (Orwell é demasiado apropriado para eu conseguir evitar referi-lo repetidamente), os nossos governantes mudam de opinião como se nunca tivessem pensado de forma diferente, como se não devessem explicações a ninguém, como se mantivessem a legitimidade eleitoral obtida com um programa proposto que se evaporou. Claro que, como ainda não vivemos bem na Oceania do livro, o governo lá acaba por ser entalado de vez em quando com um resultado constante: culpa-se o governo anterior por ter deixado buracos, covas, fendas e afins falhas nas contas públicas, tão grandes mas tão bem escondidas que estes vão dando com elas aos poucos, só quando convém. Quando até isto falha, culpa-se o mau tempo. Só falta recorrer ao zodíaco.

A crise - "o que há num nome?!"

A explicação da nossa crise tem passado por um processo semelhante, mas com um impacto que vai muito além da constatação de que temos um governo de mentirosos compulsivos demonstrada acima. Inicialmente a crise portuguesa era consequência da crise internacional. Seguiu-se um período conturbado em que foi dito aos portugueses que a crise era igualmente culpa da governação de Sócrates. Depois disto, caído o governo, o problema deixou de ser só a governação de Sócrates mas as várias governações socialistas. Do outro lado da barricada mantinha-se a teoria do impacto do contexto internacional. Eleito o novo governo, manteve-se o discurso de culpabilização do PS, transportado da crise para qualquer questiúncula parlamentar. Com o passar do tempo, começa a aparecer um outro critério importante, a Europa. Parece que na causa da crise, ou pelo menos como factor agravante preponderante estava uma política de investimento público generalizado e avultado imposta pela União Europeia no sentido de aplacar a crise internacional, indicação esta que foi revogada e invertida pela actuação da troika em vários países e consequente tentativa de unificação do discurso. Agora a crise não era internacional, era culpa do despesismo e preguiça dos países da periferia, especialmente os do sul da Europa.
Temos assim passado os últimos anos com cortes de poder de compra com a justificação de que estamos a resolver uma crise. Mas afinal os sacrificados sabem o que estão a pagar? Percebem o que estão a comentar? Afinal que medidas nos trouxeram a isto? De quem é a culpa? Estamos a resolver os problemas financeiros internacionais que levaram a isto? Ou foi mesmo só culpa nossa e estamos a pagar penitência? Mas quais de nós viveram mesmo acima das possibilidades? Os países do sul têm mesmo que ter condições de vida inferior às do norte porque são essas as suas possibilidades?
Não consigo responder a isto tudo. Não sei o suficiente para ser capaz de o fazer. Sei que alguns destes argumentos são treta, ou são pelo menos mal aplicados: não se pode dizer que vivemos acima das nossas possibilidades e depois corrigir isso nas pessoas com pensões de 1000 euros; não se pode dizer que o nosso problema é défice orçamental e justificar com isso a venda de empresas que dão lucro. O que quero demonstrar aqui é a falta de qualidade do nosso sistema político actual e os seus agentes do costume. Estão a forçar-nos a empobrecer sem nos dar uma explicação satisfatória da situação a que chegámos.

Irrevogável: a palavra do ano

Votei em irrevogável para a palavra do ano 2013 porque achei que depois de ter sido tão maltratada pelo PP merecia uma compensação, uma espécie de prémio carreira, em reconhecimento pelos anos que se aguentou sem que lhe violassem o significado. Se há melhor exemplo de newspeak português do que uma "demissão irrevogável" que afinal significa promoção - embora sem alteração da ortografia - eu não conheço.
Claro que o problema não é PP ter voltado atrás com a sua decisão. Não é exactamente uma situação agradável para o país (muito menos para a tão importante confiança dos mercados) nem o seria para qualquer indivíduo em tal posição. No entanto, de cara cada vez mais bem lavada, o PP conseguiu demitir-se com pompa e circunstância (faz quase tudo com pompa e circunstância), dizendo que a sua decisão tinha sido tão bem ponderada e era de tal forma séria que era irrevogável. De seguida volta a integrar o governo, desta feita com uma posição de maior relevo e com responsabilidade na execução de um plano com o qual aparentemente discordava (não era precisamente nas medidas difíceis que Portas se baseava para justificar a sua demissão irrevogável?).
Vai-se a ver e afinal só era irrevogável a saída do cargo de ministro dos negócios estrangeiros. Devia haver alguma infestação nas instalações do ministério, tal foi a velocidade com que o novo vice-PM foi em busca de novo poiso. Infestação essa talvez explique as loucuras do novo MNE - alguma febre da carraça - que é de tal forma contraditório com o restante governo que só mesmo pelo exercício do doublethink podemos perceber que simultaneamente pertença ao executivo de PPC e diga aquelas barbaridades/verdades quando viaja. Entretanto Machete tem estado mais calado: terá sido tratado ou só silenciado? Haverá alguma diferença?

O estado social: gorduras, direitos adquiridos, sacrifícios e insustentabilidade

Uma das coisas que é inevitavelmente discutida em momentos de crise, em especial pela "direita", é o dito peso do estado social. A actual não foi excepção. Inicialmente, em alturas de oposição parlamentar, a direita opta pela acusação de despesismo ao governo socialista. Depois faz cair o governo (não sozinha, de facto) com a acusação de estar a sacrificar os portugueses. Em período eleitoral o discurso tem uma transformação maravilhosa e a direita subitamente parece socialista: os portugueses não aguentam mais; quando estivermos no governo isto vai tudo melhorar; nem pensar em mexer nos subsídios para reparar os estragos do governo anterior; só falta remover as "gorduras" do estado social para compor o país e afins promessas. Chegados ao posto pretendido, a direita no governo começa a regressar ao discurso original: afinal isto está muito mau; o governo anterior deixou isto pior do que pensávamos; vamos ter que fazer sacrifícios; o programa da troika é o nosso programa de governo. Com a progressão do chamado "ajustamento", conforme as pessoas vão percebendo que as gorduras nunca mais são identificadas e removidas e se vão cansando das desculpas com as surpresas deixadas pela governação anterior, o governo antagonizado cai na culpabilização: as pessoas viveram acima das suas possibilidades; os direitos adquiridos estão a destruir as finanças do estado; as pessoas não querem pagar o estado social a que se habituaram; o estado social é insustentável. À medida que a moral do governo vai sendo desgastada por uma luta contra o que grande parte dos portugueses querem sem qualquer possibilidade de os convencer - sem esquecer o descalabro eleitoral das autárquicas e a aproximação dos próximos momentos eleitorais - chegamos à última fase: a troika afinal enganou-se; o memorando estava desajustado; temos que recuperar a parcela de soberania que perdemos; estamos em contagem decrescente para a saída da troika; os cortes e aumentos de impostos são temporários, etc..
Apesar destas sucessivas alterações ao seu discurso, o governo não mudou praticamente nada da sua actuação. Continua o ataque ao estado social, o empobrecimento por redução de direitos e aumento de impostos (que afecta mesmo quem ganha miseravelmente a medir pelos padrões europeus), a transferência de poder económico dos trabalhadores para os patrões (veja-se a preferência pela redução do IRC num contexto de IVA e IRS elevados e sobretaxas afins). Não esquecer a privatização selectiva das empresas que dão lucro ao estado que não faz sentido associada ao discurso de um estado social estruturalmente insustentável: ou justificamos a privatização pela necessidade de livrar o estado de empresas que dão despesa com a esperança que uma gestão privada as regenere (deixo a crítica a esta ideia para outra ocasião) ou privatizamos por ideologia num momento em que o estado pode dispensar o lucro perdido, ou ainda, vendemos por desespero por precisarmos de um influxo de dinheiro imediato que só estas vendas nos possam arranjar (este obviamente não é o caso dado o dinheiro que estamos a perder com as privatizações que já ocorreram).

_________________________________________________________________

Talvez ainda mais grave do que um governo incompetente, é o efeito a longo prazo que esta governação terá. A nível económico prevê-se um longo período até que o país pelo menos volte ao que já foi. Mas a alteração da forma de ver a governação, a sociedade, a constituição, a relação entre os trabalhadores e os patrões, a relação entre os remunerados e os dependentes pode ter consequências ainda mais graves, porque mais profundas, prolongadas e perigosas. Estamos a construir um país de gente descrente na democracia, desligada dos seus representantes máximos, com desprezo pelos partidos e em guerra consigo própria: os trabalhadores contra os subsidiados, os desempregados contra os trabalhadores, todos contra os reformados que "tanto" recebem quando já nem trabalham e contra os políticos, claro. Por outro lado, é uma gente que, talvez pelo desespero aprendido, talvez pela falta de construção de uma mentalidade pró-activa e crítica, se torna relativamente pacata perante os ataques à sua qualidade de vida (ou sobrevivência), o que, a longo prazo, levará a um de dois caminhos: um Portugal de massa amorfa e meia dúzia de gente numa elite governante exploradora ou um Portugal em que já ninguém tem nada a perder e se revolta contra as instituições democráticas. Eu sei que não quero nem um, nem outro. Precisamos, todos, de partidos, políticos, comentadores e jornalistas que saibam falar para os portugueses, não só com honestidade mas com uma linguagem compreensível e coerente, quer se queira pedir sacrifícios, quer se queira considerá-los errados, quer se queira mais estado social ou menos estado social, quer se queira sair do Euro e da União Europeia quer se queira maior ligação com a comunidade ou até federalismo europeu.

Neste caminho arrisca-se tudo.

_________________________________________________________________

outras postas sobre esta temática algures na blogosfera:
http://arrastao.org/2928343.html
http://arrastao.org/2928653.html
http://365forte.blogs.sapo.pt/a-nova-normalidade-183750

Quote / Citação (34)

"All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals, and some of them yield important vegetable products such as rubber which in colder climates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively expensive methods. But above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. Whichever power controls equatorial Africa, or the countries of the Middle East, or Southern India, or the Indonesian Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies of scores or hundreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies. The inhabitants of these areas, reduced more or less openly to the status of slaves, pass continually from conqueror to conqueror, and are expended like so much coal or oil in the race to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, to control more labour power, to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, and so on indefinitely. It should be noted that the fighting never really moves beyond the edges of the disputed areas.

(...)

but the balance of power always remains roughly even, and the territory which forms the heartland of each super-state always remains inviolate. Moreover, the labour of the exploited peoples round the Equator is not really necessary to the world’s economy. They add nothing to the wealth of the world, since whatever they produce is used for purposes of war, and the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.

(...)

The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. At present, when few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes of destruction had been at work. The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient — a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete — was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society.

(...)

Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there. From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process — by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute — the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction — indeed, in some sense was the destruction — of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction.

(...)

For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

Quote / Citação (33)

"It was at night that they came for you, always at night. The proper thing was to kill yourself before they got you. Undoubtedly some people did so. Many of the disappearances were actually suicides. But it needed desperate courage to kill yourself in a world where firearms, or any quick and certain poison, were completely unprocurable. He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed. He might have silenced the dark-haired girl if only he had acted quickly enough: but precisely because of the extremity of his danger he had lost the power to act. It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body. Even now, in spite of the gin, the dull ache in his belly made consecutive thought impossible. And it is the same, he perceived, in all seemingly heroic or tragic situations. On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth."

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

Quote / Citação (32)

"Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

(...)

They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumours and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice."

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

Quote / Citação (31)

"Under ground, under ground! Down in the safe soft womb of earth, where there is no getting of jobs or losing of jobs, no relatives or friends to plague you, no hope, fear, ambition, honour, duty — no duns of any kind. That was where he wished to be.

Yet it was not death, actual physical death, that he wished for. It was a queer feeling that he had. It had been with him ever since that morning when he had woken up in the police cell. The evil, mutinous mood that comes after drunkenness seemed to have set into a habit. That drunken night had marked a period in his life. It had dragged him downward with strange suddenness. Before, he had fought against the money-code, and yet he had clung to his wretched remnant of decency. But now it was precisely from decency that he wanted to escape. He wanted to go down, deep down, into some world where decency no longer mattered; to cut the strings of his self-respect, to submerge himself — to sink, as Rosemary had said. It was all bound up in his mind with the thought of being under ground. He liked to think about the lost people, the under-ground people: tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes. It is a good world that they inhabit, down there in their frowzy kips and spikes. He liked to think that beneath the world of money there is that great sluttish underworld where failure and success have no meaning; a sort of kingdom of ghosts where all are equal. That was where he wished to be, down in the ghost-kingdom, below ambition. It comforted him somehow to think of the smoke-dim slums of South London sprawling on and on, a huge graceless wilderness where you could lose yourself for ever.

And in a way this job was what he wanted; at any rate, it was something near what he wanted. Down there in Lambeth, in winter, in the murky streets where the sepia-shadowed faces of tea-drunkards drifted through the mist, you had a submerged feeling. Down here you had no contact with money or with culture. No highbrow customers to whom you had to act the highbrow; no one who was capable of asking you, in that prying way that prosperous people have, ‘What are you, with your brains and education, doing in a job like this?’ You were just part of the slum, and, like all slum-dwellers, taken for granted. The youths and girls and draggled middle-aged women who came to the library scarcely even spotted the fact that Gordon was an educated man. He was just ‘the bloke at the library’, and practically one of themselves."

George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

London Pleasures by Gordon Comstock [Quote / Citação (30)]

"Sharply the menacing wind sweeps over

The bending poplars, newly bare,

And the dark ribbons of the chimneys

Veer downward; flicked by whips of air,

Torn posters flutter; coldly sound

The boom of trains and the rattle of hooves,

And the clerks who hurry to the station

Look, shuddering, over the eastern rooves,

Thinking, each one, ‘Here comes the winter!

Please God I keep my job this year!’

And bleakly, as the cold strikes through

Their entrails like an icy spear,

They think of rent, rates, season tickets,

Insurance, coal, the skivvy’s wages,

Boots, school-bills, and the next instalment

Upon the two twin beds from Drage’s.

For if in careless summer days

In groves of Ashtaroth we whored,

Repentant now, when winds blow cold,

We kneel before our rightful lord;

The lord of all, the money-god,

Who rules us blood and hand and brain,

Who gives the roof that stops the wind,

And, giving, takes away again;

Who spies with jealous, watchful care,

Our thoughts, our dreams, our secret ways,

Who picks our words and cuts our clothes,

And maps the pattern of our days;

Who chills our anger, curbs our hope,

And buys our lives and pays with toys,

Who claims as tribute broken faith,

Accepted insults, muted joys;

Who binds with chains the poet’s wit,

The navvy’s strength, the soldier’s pride,

And lays the sleek, estranging shield

Between the lover and his bride."

George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

Quote / Citação (29)

Something deep below made the stone street shiver. The tube-train, sliding through middle earth. He had a vision of London, of the western world; he saw a thousand million slaves toiling and grovelling about the throne of money. The earth is ploughed, ships sail, miners sweat in dripping tunnels underground, clerks hurry for the eight-fifteen with the fear of the boss eating at their vitals. And even in bed with their wives they tremble and obey. Obey whom? The money-priesthood, the pink-faced masters of the world. The Upper Crust. A welter of sleek young rabbits in thousand guinea motor cars, of golfing stockbrokers and cosmopolitan financiers, of Chancery lawyers and fashionable Nancy boys, of bankers, newspaper peers, novelists of all four sexes, American pugilists, lady aviators, film stars, bishops, titled poets, and Chicago gorillas.

George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

Quote / Citação (28)

"It was so rarely that he could attain the peace of mind in which poetry, or prose for that matter, has got to be written. The times when he ‘could not’ work grew commoner and commoner. Of all types of human being, only the artist takes it upon him to say that he ‘cannot’ work. But it is quite true; there are times when one cannot work. Money again, always money! Lack of money means discomfort, means squalid worries, means shortage of tobacco, means ever-present consciousness of failure — above all, it means loneliness. How can you be anything but lonely on two quid a week? And in loneliness no decent book was ever written. It was quite certain that London Pleasures would never be the poem he had conceived — it was quite certain, indeed, that it would never even be finished. And in the moments when he faced facts Gordon himself was aware of this.

Yet all the same, and all the more for that very reason, he went on with it. It was something to cling to. It was a way of hitting back at his poverty and his loneliness. And after all, there were times when the mood of creation returned, or seemed to return."

George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

Quote / Citação (27)

"‘Oh, leave me alone, for God’s sake!’ he said irritably, stepping out of Flaxman’s reach, and went up the stairs without looking back.

Flaxman settled his hat on his head and made for the front door, mildly offended. Gordon reflected dully that it was always like this nowadays. He was for ever snubbing friendly advances. Of course it was money that was at the bottom of it, always money. You can’t be friendly, you can’t even be civil, when you have no money in your pocket. A spasm of self-pity went through him. His heart yearned for the saloon bar at the Crichton; the lovely smell of beer, the warmth and bright lights, the cheery voices, the clatter of glasses on the beer-wet bar. Money, money! He went on, up the dark evil-smelling stairs. The thought of his cold lonely bedroom at the top of the house was like a doom before him."

George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

Quote / Citação (26)

"Gordon watched them go. They were just by-products. The throw-outs of the money-god. All over London, by tens of thousands, draggled old beasts of that description; creeping like unclean beetles to the grave.

He gazed out at the graceless street. At this moment it seemed to him that in a street like this, in a town like this, every life that is lived must be meaningless and intolerable. The sense of disintegration, of decay, that is endemic in our time, was strong upon him. Somehow it was mixed up with the ad-posters opposite. He looked now with more seeing eyes at those grinning yard-wide faces. After all, there was more there than mere silliness, greed, and vulgarity. Roland Butta grins at you, seemingly optimistic, with a flash of false teeth. But what is behind the grin? Desolation, emptiness, prophecies of doom. For can you not see, if you know how to look, that behind that slick self-satisfaction, that tittering fat-bellied triviality, there is nothing but a frightful emptiness, a secret despair? The great death-wish of the modern world. Suicide pacts. Heads stuck in gas-ovens in lonely maisonettes. French letters and Amen Pills. And the reverberations of future wars. Enemy aeroplanes flying over London; the deep threatening hum of the propellers, the shattering thunder of the bombs. It is all written in Roland Butta’s face."

George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

Quote / Citação (25)

"It was queer, really. Even at the time it struck me as queer. I was a second-loot with hardly any Cockney accent left, I could already distinguish between Arnold Bennett and Elinor Glyn, and yet it was only four years since I’d been slicing cheese behind the counter in my white apron and looking forward to the days when I’d be a master-grocer. If I tot up the account, I suppose I must admit that the war did me good as well as harm. At any rate that year of reading novels was the only real education, in the sense of book-learning, that I’ve ever had. It did certain things to my mind. It gave me an attitude, a kind of questioning attitude, which I probably wouldn’t have had if I’d gone through life in a normal sensible way. But — I wonder if you can understand this — the thing that really changed me, really made an impression on me, wasn’t so much the books I read as the rotten meaninglessness of the life I was leading."

George Orwell, Coming Up for Air (1939)

Quote / Citação (24)

"It struck me that perhaps a lot of the people you see walking about are dead. We say that a man’s dead when his heart stops and not before. It seems a bit arbitrary. After all, parts of your body don’t stop working — hair goes on growing for years, for instance. Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea. Old Porteous is like that. Wonderfully learned, wonderfully good taste — but he’s not capable of change. Just says the same things and thinks the same thoughts over and over again. There are a lot of people like that. Dead minds, stopped inside. Just keep moving backwards and forwards on the same little track, getting fainter all the time, like ghosts."

George Orwell, Coming Up for Air (1939)

Quote / Citação (23)

"Every thinking person nowadays is stiff with fright. This is merely a chap who’s got sufficient foresight to be a little more frightened than the others. Hitler’s after us! Quick! Let’s all grab a spanner and get together, and perhaps if we smash in enough faces they won’t smash ours. Gang up, choose your Leader. Hitler’s black and Stalin’s white. But it might just as well be the other way about, because in the little chap’s mind both Hitler and Stalin are the same. Both mean spanners and smashed faces.

War! I started thinking about it again. It’s coming soon, that’s certain. But who’s afraid of war? That’s to say, who’s afraid of the bombs and the machine-guns? ‘You are’, you say. Yes, I am, and so’s anybody who’s ever seen them. But it isn’t the war that matters, it’s the after-war. The world we’re going down into, the kind of hate-world, slogan-world. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep. And the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke. It’s all going to happen. Or isn’t it? Some days I know it’s impossible, other days I know it’s inevitable. That night, at any rate, I knew it was going to happen. It was all in the sound of the little lecturer’s voice."

George Orwell, Coming Up for Air (1939)

Quote / Citação (22)

"I was discovering what three-quarters of the blokes who’d been officers were discovering — that from a financial point of view we’d been better off in the Army than we were ever likely to be again. We’d suddenly changed from gentlemen holding His Majesty’s commission into miserable out-of-works whom nobody wanted. My ideas soon sank from two thousand a year to three or four pounds a week. But even jobs of the three or four pounds a week kind didn’t seem to exist. Every mortal job was filled already, either by men who’d been a few years too old to fight, or by boys who’d been a few months too young. The poor bastards who’d happened to be born between 1890 and 1900 were left out in the cold.

(...)

But there were no jobs for travelling salesmen — that’s to say, jobs with a salary attached. What there were, however, were on- commission jobs. That racket was just beginning on a big, scale. It’s a beautifully simple method of increasing your sales and advertising your stuff without taking any risks, and it always flourishes when times are bad. They keep you on a string by hinting that perhaps there’ll be a salaried job going in three months’ time, and when you get fed up there’s always some other poor devil ready to take over.

(...)

Selling things on commission is actually what I like doing, provided I can see my way to making a bit of dough out of it. I don’t know whether I learned much in that year, but I unlearned a good deal. It knocked the Army nonsense out of me, and it drove into the back of my head the notions that I’d picked up during the idle year when I was reading novels. I don’t think I read a single book, barring detective stories, all the time I was on the road. I wasn’t a highbrow any longer. I was down among the realities of modern life. And what are the realities of modern life? Well, the chief one is an everlasting, frantic struggle to sell things. With most people it takes the form of selling themselves — that’s to say, getting a job and keeping it. I suppose there hasn’t been a single month since the war, in any trade you care to name, in which there weren’t more men than jobs. It’s brought a peculiar, ghastly feeling into life. It’s like on a sinking ship when there are nineteen survivors and fourteen lifebelts. But is there anything particularly modern in that, you say? Has it anything to do with the war? Well, it feels as if it had. That feeling that you’ve got to be everlastingly fighting and hustling, that you’ll never get anything unless you grab it from somebody else, that there’s always somebody after your job, the next month or the month after they’ll be reducing staff and it’s you that’ll get the bird — THAT, I swear, didn’t exist in the old life before the war."

George Orwell, Coming Up for Air (1939)

Quote / Citação (20)

"Well, for several months I had an appetite for books that was almost like physical thirst. It was the first real go-in at reading that I’d had since my Dick Donovan days. At the beginning I had no idea how to set about getting hold of books. I thought the only way was to buy them. That’s interesting, I think. It shows you the difference upbringing makes. I suppose the children of the middle classes, the 500 pounds a year middle classes, know all about Mudie’s and the Times Book Club when they’re in their cradles. A bit later I learned of the existence of lending libraries and took out a subscription at Mudie’s and another at a library in Bristol. And what I read during the next year or so! Wells, Conrad, Kipling, Galsworthy, Barry Pain, W. W. Jacobs, Pett Ridge, Oliver Onions, Compton Mackenzie, H. Seton Merriman, Maurice Baring, Stephen McKenna, May Sinclair, Arnold Bennett, Anthony Hope, Elinor Glyn, O. Henry, Stephen Leacock, and even Silas Hocking and Jean Stratton Porter. How many of the names in that list are known to you, I wonder? Half the books that people took seriously in those days are forgotten now."

 George Orwell, Coming Up for Air (1939)

Quote / Citação (19)

"The war did extraordinary things to people. And what was more extraordinary than the way it killed people was the way it sometimes didn’t kill them. It was like a great flood rushing you along to death, and suddenly it would shoot you up some backwater where you’d find yourself doing incredible and pointless things and drawing extra pay for them. There were labour battalions making roads across the desert that didn’t lead anywhere, there were chaps marooned on oceanic islands to look out for German cruisers which had been sunk years earlier, there were Ministries of this and that with armies of clerks and typists which went on existing years after their function had ended, by a kind of inertia. People were shoved into meaningless jobs and then forgotten by the authorities for years on end. This was what happened to myself, or very likely I wouldn’t be here. The whole sequence of events is rather interesting."

George Orwell, Coming Up for Air (1939)

Quote / Citação (18)

"There was a temporary feeling about everything. In the old days, which as a matter of fact were barely a year old, the whole thing would have been an appalling disaster. With Father dead, the shop sold and Mother with two hundred pounds in the world, you’d have seen stretching out in front of you a kind of fifteen-act tragedy, the last act being a pauper’s funeral. But now the war and the feeling of not being one’s own master overshadowed everything. People hardly thought in terms of things like bankruptcy and the workhouse any longer."

George Orwell, Coming Up for Air (1939)

Quote / Citação (17)

"It was like an enormous machine that had got hold of you. You’d no sense of acting of your own free will, and at the same time no notion of trying to resist. If people didn’t have some such feeling as that, no war could last three months. The armies would just pack up and go home. Why had I joined the Army? Or the million other idiots who joined up before conscription came in? Partly for a lark and partly because of England my England and Britons never never and all that stuff. But how long did that last? Most of the chaps I knew had forgotten all about it long before they got as far as France. The men in the trenches weren’t patriotic, didn’t hate the Kaiser, didn’t care a damn about gallant little Belgium and the Germans raping nuns on tables (it was always ‘on tables’, as though that made it worse) in the streets of Brussels. On the other hand it didn’t occur to them to try and escape. The machine had got hold of you and it could do what it liked with you. It lifted you up and dumped you down among places and things you’d never dreamed of, and if it had dumped you down on the surface of the moon it wouldn’t have seemed particularly strange."

George Orwell, Coming Up for Air (1939)

Quote / Citação (5)

"For the rest, she grew used to the life that she was leading - used to the enormous sleepless nights, the cold, the dirt, the boredom, and the horrible communism of the Square. After a day or two she had ceased to feel even a flicker of surprise at her situation. She had come, like everyone about her, to accept this monstrous existence almost as though it were normal. The dazed, witless feeling that she had known on the way to the hopfields had come back upon her more strongly than before. It is the common effect of sleeplessness and still more of exposure. To live continuously in the open air, never going under a roof for more than an hour or two, blurs your perceptions like a strong light glaring in your eyes or a noise drumming in your ears. You act and plan and suffer, and yet all the while it is as though everything were a little out of focus, a little unreal. The world, inner and outer, grows dimmer till it reaches almost the vagueness of a dream."

George Orwell, A Clergyman's Daughter (1935)

Cenas (1)

Este artigo do Guardian é uma breve mas excelente leitura que relembra o fosso entre as intenções e ideais e os resultados. George Orwell comenta a visão idealista, na altura decerto considerada muito ingénua, de Oscar Wilde quanto ao socialismo. O que nos lembra este comentário é de que não é por termos conhecido os sistemas socialistas autoritários e desumanos que devemos criticar a ideologia per se. O socialismo, mesmo o considerado utópico, deve ser levado em conta sempre que pensamos o mundo humano, a sociedade e a economia, sob pena de ignorarmos algumas das mais importantes lições históricas e ideias desenvolvidas quanto ao que queremos para o futuro, que consideramos realmente necessário, bom ou justo. Ler isto inspira-nos a ter cuidado e evitar confundir os fins, os meios e os motivos iniciais, aliás, tal como, na direcção inversa, dizemos que os fins não justificam os meios.

Queria também recomendar a leitura deste post de Pacheco Pereira que resume bem a actual vida política portuguesa, incluindo no que se refere aos comentadores e bloggers. Infelizmente, ele tem toda a razão. Pensar e gerir um país como se fosse uma luta de claques de futebol numa mesa de matraquilhos só pode resultar em desastre, a curto e a longo prazo.

Por fim, vi recentemente o filme-documentário-entrevista Examined Life, partilhado pel'O Germe e adorei. Se há alguns problemas a nível da realização, filmagem e banda sonora, a verdade é que tudo isso é secundário e quase irrelevante perante o interesse do discurso dos vários convidados, aos quais são dados dez minutos para comentar uma determinada questão: Cornel West fala de verdade, Peter Singer de ética, Slavoj Žižek de ecologia, Avital Ronell de significado ou sentido, Martha Nussbaum de justiça, Michael Hardt de revolução, Kwame Anthony Appiah de cosmopolismo e Judith Butler com Sunaura Taylor de interdependência. Vale muito a pena ver e pensar em como a filosofia faz parte da vida e não é, tanto como se pensa, somente uma ocupação de mentes académicas superiores ou afastadas da realidade.
Se eu pudesse dedicar a minha vida a estes assuntos, da forma como eles são, embora superficialmente, explorados nesta obra, não tenham dúvida que o faria. Sou um viciado em pensar e em discutir estes conceitos ou questões e só assim percebo que possa valer a pena viver. A humanidade como um todo melhora ou evolui somente através deste exercício.