"It is a natural impulse of human beings to evade the narrowness of personal and family routine to venture into the wider universe of history, where you feel that your life is transcendent and get a higher "sense". The most banal and clumsy way to do it, accessible even to the poor, incapable and rogue is the militancy in a party or a "cause", that is, in some group embellished with pompous words like "freedom", "equality", "justice", "patriotism", "morality" or "human rights". These words can represent any substantive value, but not when the individual acquires from them all the value they may have, rather than filling them with his own personal substance. The most criminal illusion of modernity was to persuade men that they can be noble by identifying with a "cause", when in fact all causes, while names of abstract values, only acquire concrete value by the nobility of men who represent them. The bottom of degradation is achieved when some "causes" are so valued that they seem to infuse virtues automatically in any bum, fake or bandit who agrees to represent them."
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Diário do Comércio - Causas Sagradas (17 January 2012)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Olavo_de_Carvalho
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Olavo de Carvalho
Olavo Luiz Pimentel de Carvalho (29 April 1947 – 24 January 2022), better known as Olavo de Carvalho, was a Brazilian essayist whose interests included historical philosophy, the history of revolutionary movements, Kremlinology, the traditionalist school, comparative religion, psychology, and philosophical anthropology. He was known in Brazil for his conservative political stance, and for being a critic of the political Left.
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