small potatoes

I would like to get back to the issue of Atlântico for a few final notes because I think it has lessons to be learned for future liberal projects.

What were the cardinal sins commited by the promoters of the project? Their clubby spirit, their self-righteousness, their exclusive attitude and their obvious lack of intellectual capacity to deal with different ideas: "Here we are, the right and good guys. Whoever thinks differently from us is not right and cannot be a good guy, thus his character must be assassinated". This was their attitude.

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In this sense, their project was not different from Arrastão, 5 Dias or Blasfémias. Would you like to live in a society run by these fellows? I, for sure, wouldn't. This is intolerance at its worst. These people tend to be severe critics of the Inquisition, but I believe that what the Inquisition did is small potatoes compared to what they would do if they had the appropriate circumstances and power.

I believe that if I have done something in the blogosphere, this was testing the liberalism of some alleged liberal bloggers. I must confess that I have enjoyed it greatly. According to my own criteria, a lot of them have failed. Their worst mistake was the way they reacted to some of the ideas I put forward, including those about Jewish and Catholic cultures and the Salazar regime. They usually resorted to insulting and character assassination, instead of putting forward a different, alternative view and then letting the market (that is, the readers) decide. This is the true liberal attitude.

There is one other aspect worth noting about the leaders of Atlântico: their holistic way of thinking which for me is a sign of their intellectual immaturity. They see life in radical terms, social systems and cultures being seen as wholly good (such as Judaism) or wholly bad (such as Salazarism or Catholicism). There is no middle ground involving an appropriate balance between positive and negative aspects of these realities. This kind of radicalism is not difficult to find among intellectuals but it is essentially anti-liberal. For what is difficult to reach in life is not radical solutions, but equilibrium solutions, workable compromises that please the greatest possible number of people without hurting or offending anyone else seriously.