Brazil of the humiliated

In this book, Jessé Souza clearly demonstrates our true place in the world and presents the importance of understanding how our intellectual elite, submissive to the wealthy elite, constructed a distorted image of Brazil by disguising all kinds of unfair privileges.

In an illuminating and easy-to-read text, Brasil dos Humiliados (Brazil of the Humiliated) reveals the elitist foundations of dominant Brazilian social thought, which blames the supposedly inferior and corrupt people for their own abandonment. Furthermore, it exposes how economic and political elites appropriate this "intelligence" to increase their dominance over the population and boost their profits.

We know it's difficult to explain Brazil, a country of vast wealth and an abysmally unequal society. When we turn to the answers offered by Brazilian social science since 1930, we deal with hegemonic views of ourselves that are used by the elite and its press to describe us as more dishonest, uglier, and dumber than the inhabitants of the global North, as if we were cursed to reproduce unreliable social types.

This provincial and derogatory view of the Brazilian people was shaped by the ideas of the country's most important interpreters, such as Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, and carried forward to the present day by other fundamental thinkers, such as Raymundo Faoro and Roberto DaMatta, influencing much of the national intelligence to this day. With scientific legitimization, the "foolishness of Brazilian intelligence"—Jesé Souza's ironic expression to refer to these biased interpretations of our social thought—spread throughout society: from the industrial, financial, and media elites to political parties, from the right to the left. This led to stigmas about the people's supposed corruption, self-created poverty, and laziness, creating a self-image of Brazil as a nation without a future and a perception of Brazilians as beings devoid of virtue.

“Sociologist Jessé Souza questions the foundations of national thought.” - El País

"The central thesis of this book by Jessé Souza is that such 'symbolic violence' is only possible through the hijacking of 'Brazilian intelligence' to serve not the vast majority of the population, but rather the richest 1%. This is what makes it possible to justify, for example, that Brazil's problems do not stem from the extraordinary concentration of wealth, but rather from 'state corruption,' leading to a false opposition between a demonized state and a virtuous market." - Fernando Nogueira da Costa

“The core of Jessé Souza's contribution lies in the attempt to show that modern 'central' and 'peripheral' societies are not as distinct as they seem.” - Alexandre de Freitas Barbosa

“For the understanding of artistic and literary practices in a country of such marked inequality (...), Jessé Souza's various original contributions are capable of producing strident echoes.” - Gabriel Estides Delgado