Por Jean Wyllys
.jpeg)
“How do you explain the fact that in these elections most of this country’s economic elite—bankers, big business leaders, industrialists, financial market players, and the mass media, especially Globo, Folha de S.Paulo, Estadão, and the rest—are backing mainstays of the Bolsonaro regime?”
“How can these people support a family whose political record is so tainted by attacks on democratic institutions and by the inhumane positions they took during the COVID-19 pandemic?” (The toll, I would add, was some 700,000 deaths with higher mortality rates concentrated in municipalities of Bolsonaro supporters who shared his denialist views.)
“How can people forget the images of those open graves, of people dying of suffocation, and all the regime’s statements trivialising the disease as a “little flu” and attacking the vaccines?”
“How could we forget the stalwart role played by institutions and authorities who defended democracy against the coup attempt of 8 January 2023?”
“Is there some kind of warped spirit among journalists who treat all these things as if they never happened and then continue to concoct stories favouring this Bolsonaro faction?”
These are highly pertinent questions but very difficult to answer. I did my best at the time but now, trying to give clearer responses with arguments and verifiable data, I’ll turn to the concepts of “gratitude” and “envy” in psychoanalysis and sociology.
Since he was elected president for the first time in 2003, and during his terms of office, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has brought about significant material changes in the lives of millions of Brazilians. But this hasn’t spared him from being caught up in a complicated psychological and social mix of envy and gratitude felt and expressed by individuals and collectives. In saying this, I draw on my personal memories, my almost three decades of working as a journalist, and also my reading of Lula: A Biography by Fernando Morais.
I’ll start with a video that went viral and moved everyone who isn’t dead in spirit, poisoned by hatred, and choked by prejudice served out and exploited for financial gain in the social media. It shows a mother weeping as she tells her son she disagrees with his decision not to vote for Lula. She tells him about her experience of what it was like to be hungry, about the years when she had to eat “coffee with flour”, a mixture that was one of the few things my siblings and I were fed on many occasions of want, as was also the case with Lula.
What this scene represents for me is more than an electoral discussion. It’s a conflict between two sets of memories. The mother speaks from direct experience of hunger while her son argues from a later reality where certain achievements may seem natural, as if they always existed.
This is where gratitude comes in.
In psychoanalysis, gratitude was a particularly important concept of Melanie Klein’s. In Envy and Gratitude (1957), she explores the relationship between the feelings of envy and gratitude and describes how the ability to recognise and internalise the positive feeling is countered by the difficulty of tolerating the fact that another person possesses something desirable which you don’t have. Before Klein, Georg Simmel (1908) had seen gratitude as the “moral memory of mankind”, connecting past and present, an element of lasting relationships and of the constitution of a “we”, while Marcel Mauss in The Gift (1925), also showed how gratitude, duty, reciprocity, and recognition play a role in the construction of social bonds.
Gratitude, then, is more than simply saying “thank you”. It means recognising that we’re being given something we didn’t produce ourselves and cherishing the memory of the gift.
So, what’s the opposite of gratitude? Attentive reading of Klein, Simmel, and Mauss, shows that it’s not so much “ingratitude” as envy, the difficulty in accepting the fact that someone else has something of value, which might lead to the devaluation or destruction of one’s own possessions or status.
Most of the ruling class can accept reforms as long as they don’t threaten their own “distinct” position. But change can also trigger greater resistance when it threatens not only wealth but also distinctiveness, prestige, or symbolic superiority.
There’s an unforgettable scene in Anna Muylaert’s film The Second Mother where Val, the brown-skinned housemaid from the northeast of Brazil tells her white employer that her daughter, Jessica, has scored far higher in the Faculty of Architecture entrance exam than the latter’s spoilt-brat son Fabinho. The mother and son react with pure envy to the maid’s daughter’s achievement. Val and Jessica are threatening because they threaten not impoverishment but a socially superior position. Val’s gratitude in the film and that of the mother in the video who weeps over her son’s voting choice can be compared with the gratitude of real-life people for Lula’s policies while most of the ruling class fear and envy politics that doesn’t pander to them.
But the ruling class is doing fine. The big private banks kept raking in huge profits during Lila’s mandates. Itaú, for example, reported a net profit of $8.87 billion US dollars in 2025. Agribusiness, representing 25.13% of the Brazilian economy, isn’t exactly bankrupt either. According to Cepea/CAN (the leading authority analysing, measuring, and reporting agribusiness indicators), the sector accounted for almost 620 billion US dollars in 2025, a 12.2% increase. And, according to the Government Communication System of the Federal Executive Branch (SICOM), the Globogroup’s earnings from federal television advertising were almost 34 million US dollars in 2023, and 32.88 million US dollars in 2024. During the Bolsonaro administration, its share of federal television advertising was less than 30%, while it approached 50% in some years of the Lula administration.
These obscene sums, set against the constant attacks, insinuations, false accusations, harassment, and insults that journalists, columnist, and editorial writers (who work to fill the pockets of their bosses) reserve for Lula show that there’s plenty of envy and a great dearth of gratitude in the sense I’ve described. This envy is so irrational that they scorn Lula and back a reckless, incompetent gangster like Flávio Bolsonaro, even though he’ll bring about his own ruin, and everyone’s else’s by extension.
Part of the middle class is also embroiled in this self-destructive electoral wrong-headedness, simply because they want to keep trying to distinguish themselves from us, the non-white outsiders. And also taking this path into darkness, there are even members of minorities stigmatised by other identities like sexual orientation, race, and gender, who succumb to envy and ingratitude towards a president who secured for them the few rights they can enjoy.
Rights don’t fall from the sky and they’re not doled out by the God of Business as neo-Pentecostal con-artists like André Valadão, Pablo Marçal, and Daniel Vorcaro would have it. Reducing hunger isn’t done by magic or miracle, and access to the university isn’t granted by Bible thumpers. Improved food consumption for the poor, social benefits, and opportunities are the result of public policies, social struggles, and historical battles fought by the left and especially by the Workers’ Party (PT), the Communist Party of Brazil (PC do B) and the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL).
When this memory fades, it’s replaced by falsolatry, the replacement of reality by emotionally convenient narratives that turn hard-won collective conquests into “meritocracy”, or “miracles” performed by the Lord’s fraudsters.
In the sense I’m talking about, gratitude doesn’t mean submission. It doesn’t mean you stop criticising the government or turn a politician like Lula into a saint. It means being honest and recognising that, with him and because of him, people’s lives have verifiably improved (even those of greedy millionaires and the press lackeys who now want to throw him out and replace him with a mafioso serving the most despicable interests of a sociopathic criminal like Donald Trump).
I hope that, like the mother who moved me to tears with her gratitude, the people of Brazil can stand up against the hate-filled envy of the bankers and press magnates, prove that they aren’t so easily deceived by their machinations, and will show their gratitude to Lula in next month’s elections. Then, may the work of giving them more reason for gratitude begin.
Jean Wyllys is a Brazilian lecturer, journalist, and politician.
.jpeg)
At a recent informal gathering of about twenty people, one of them asked me to answer a string of questions that had been keeping him awake at night, and not only him but me and everyone else there, not to mention millions of Brazilians who bear etched in their memories the frightening and painful memories of the Bolsonaro years.
“How do you explain the fact that in these elections most of this country’s economic elite—bankers, big business leaders, industrialists, financial market players, and the mass media, especially Globo, Folha de S.Paulo, Estadão, and the rest—are backing mainstays of the Bolsonaro regime?”
“How can these people support a family whose political record is so tainted by attacks on democratic institutions and by the inhumane positions they took during the COVID-19 pandemic?” (The toll, I would add, was some 700,000 deaths with higher mortality rates concentrated in municipalities of Bolsonaro supporters who shared his denialist views.)
“How can people forget the images of those open graves, of people dying of suffocation, and all the regime’s statements trivialising the disease as a “little flu” and attacking the vaccines?”
“How could we forget the stalwart role played by institutions and authorities who defended democracy against the coup attempt of 8 January 2023?”
“Is there some kind of warped spirit among journalists who treat all these things as if they never happened and then continue to concoct stories favouring this Bolsonaro faction?”
These are highly pertinent questions but very difficult to answer. I did my best at the time but now, trying to give clearer responses with arguments and verifiable data, I’ll turn to the concepts of “gratitude” and “envy” in psychoanalysis and sociology.
Since he was elected president for the first time in 2003, and during his terms of office, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has brought about significant material changes in the lives of millions of Brazilians. But this hasn’t spared him from being caught up in a complicated psychological and social mix of envy and gratitude felt and expressed by individuals and collectives. In saying this, I draw on my personal memories, my almost three decades of working as a journalist, and also my reading of Lula: A Biography by Fernando Morais.
I’ll start with a video that went viral and moved everyone who isn’t dead in spirit, poisoned by hatred, and choked by prejudice served out and exploited for financial gain in the social media. It shows a mother weeping as she tells her son she disagrees with his decision not to vote for Lula. She tells him about her experience of what it was like to be hungry, about the years when she had to eat “coffee with flour”, a mixture that was one of the few things my siblings and I were fed on many occasions of want, as was also the case with Lula.
What this scene represents for me is more than an electoral discussion. It’s a conflict between two sets of memories. The mother speaks from direct experience of hunger while her son argues from a later reality where certain achievements may seem natural, as if they always existed.
This is where gratitude comes in.
In psychoanalysis, gratitude was a particularly important concept of Melanie Klein’s. In Envy and Gratitude (1957), she explores the relationship between the feelings of envy and gratitude and describes how the ability to recognise and internalise the positive feeling is countered by the difficulty of tolerating the fact that another person possesses something desirable which you don’t have. Before Klein, Georg Simmel (1908) had seen gratitude as the “moral memory of mankind”, connecting past and present, an element of lasting relationships and of the constitution of a “we”, while Marcel Mauss in The Gift (1925), also showed how gratitude, duty, reciprocity, and recognition play a role in the construction of social bonds.
Gratitude, then, is more than simply saying “thank you”. It means recognising that we’re being given something we didn’t produce ourselves and cherishing the memory of the gift.
So, what’s the opposite of gratitude? Attentive reading of Klein, Simmel, and Mauss, shows that it’s not so much “ingratitude” as envy, the difficulty in accepting the fact that someone else has something of value, which might lead to the devaluation or destruction of one’s own possessions or status.
Most of the ruling class can accept reforms as long as they don’t threaten their own “distinct” position. But change can also trigger greater resistance when it threatens not only wealth but also distinctiveness, prestige, or symbolic superiority.
There’s an unforgettable scene in Anna Muylaert’s film The Second Mother where Val, the brown-skinned housemaid from the northeast of Brazil tells her white employer that her daughter, Jessica, has scored far higher in the Faculty of Architecture entrance exam than the latter’s spoilt-brat son Fabinho. The mother and son react with pure envy to the maid’s daughter’s achievement. Val and Jessica are threatening because they threaten not impoverishment but a socially superior position. Val’s gratitude in the film and that of the mother in the video who weeps over her son’s voting choice can be compared with the gratitude of real-life people for Lula’s policies while most of the ruling class fear and envy politics that doesn’t pander to them.
But the ruling class is doing fine. The big private banks kept raking in huge profits during Lila’s mandates. Itaú, for example, reported a net profit of $8.87 billion US dollars in 2025. Agribusiness, representing 25.13% of the Brazilian economy, isn’t exactly bankrupt either. According to Cepea/CAN (the leading authority analysing, measuring, and reporting agribusiness indicators), the sector accounted for almost 620 billion US dollars in 2025, a 12.2% increase. And, according to the Government Communication System of the Federal Executive Branch (SICOM), the Globogroup’s earnings from federal television advertising were almost 34 million US dollars in 2023, and 32.88 million US dollars in 2024. During the Bolsonaro administration, its share of federal television advertising was less than 30%, while it approached 50% in some years of the Lula administration.
These obscene sums, set against the constant attacks, insinuations, false accusations, harassment, and insults that journalists, columnist, and editorial writers (who work to fill the pockets of their bosses) reserve for Lula show that there’s plenty of envy and a great dearth of gratitude in the sense I’ve described. This envy is so irrational that they scorn Lula and back a reckless, incompetent gangster like Flávio Bolsonaro, even though he’ll bring about his own ruin, and everyone’s else’s by extension.
Part of the middle class is also embroiled in this self-destructive electoral wrong-headedness, simply because they want to keep trying to distinguish themselves from us, the non-white outsiders. And also taking this path into darkness, there are even members of minorities stigmatised by other identities like sexual orientation, race, and gender, who succumb to envy and ingratitude towards a president who secured for them the few rights they can enjoy.
Rights don’t fall from the sky and they’re not doled out by the God of Business as neo-Pentecostal con-artists like André Valadão, Pablo Marçal, and Daniel Vorcaro would have it. Reducing hunger isn’t done by magic or miracle, and access to the university isn’t granted by Bible thumpers. Improved food consumption for the poor, social benefits, and opportunities are the result of public policies, social struggles, and historical battles fought by the left and especially by the Workers’ Party (PT), the Communist Party of Brazil (PC do B) and the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL).
When this memory fades, it’s replaced by falsolatry, the replacement of reality by emotionally convenient narratives that turn hard-won collective conquests into “meritocracy”, or “miracles” performed by the Lord’s fraudsters.
In the sense I’m talking about, gratitude doesn’t mean submission. It doesn’t mean you stop criticising the government or turn a politician like Lula into a saint. It means being honest and recognising that, with him and because of him, people’s lives have verifiably improved (even those of greedy millionaires and the press lackeys who now want to throw him out and replace him with a mafioso serving the most despicable interests of a sociopathic criminal like Donald Trump).
I hope that, like the mother who moved me to tears with her gratitude, the people of Brazil can stand up against the hate-filled envy of the bankers and press magnates, prove that they aren’t so easily deceived by their machinations, and will show their gratitude to Lula in next month’s elections. Then, may the work of giving them more reason for gratitude begin.
Jean Wyllys is a Brazilian lecturer, journalist, and politician.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário