matacão

I like to think of it this way: Catholic culture is pyramidal whereas Protestant culture is like a parallelepiped.

Catholic culture loves authority; it is elitistic and stratified. Protestant culture hates authority; it is profoundly egalitarian.

Catholic culture is aristocratic. Protestant culture is democratic.

Catholic culture's economic system is corporativism (or the system of capelinhas: see how the pyramid looks like a capelinha). Protestant's culture economic system is free market competition or capitalism where everybody is equal to everybody else (see how the points in the upper edge of the parallelepiped have the same height).

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In Catholic's culture only the elite thinks; in Protestant culture everybody thinks.

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Now, if you try to force or superimpose the parallelepiped on the pyramid, what happens? Well, the top of the pyramid will fall off; and you are left with the bottom of the pyramid which essentially approaches the form of the parallelepiped. You are left with what they call a matacão in Portuguese, for that is their slang for parallelepiped.