There are two things that are probably part of the same issue.
Education in Brazil is often infected by this idea that there’s one morally good way to think. At the same time, the market, companies and entrepreneurs are demonized, as if everything they do comes from purely selfish and hateful intentions.
And there’s something important to separate here.
The kind of thinking I’m talking about is basically the childhood idea of: “If poor people exist, why don’t we just print more money?”
Ofc, the reasoning becomes more complex as people grow up, but it often doesn’t move that far away from this easy path for solving extremely complex problems.
It becomes something like: “Political power can solve everything. I hate inequality, so I’ll use state power to fix it from the top down.”
And on the other side, it becomes: “Business owners only care about profit. If they oppose this policy, it’s because they’re greedy and don’t care about poor people.”
It’s still the same childlike way of thinking. One side is automatically treated as good because it claims to help people, while the other is automatically treated as evil because it involves profit, markets or private interests.
And the educational system often validates this way of thinking. I’m still in school, so I see it almost every day.
Teachers bring up simple solutions to complex problems, usually framed through Marxist terminology: “The bourgeoisie wants to...” or “Capitalists do this because...”
And whenever someone tries to present another way of solving the problem, it’s treated like the worst thing u could possibly say.
Like: “Why are u ignoring the people who can’t afford this?” or “But history proves that we need this.”
But I don’t automatically hate the childlike moral instinct behind it.
Sometimes people genuinely hate poverty, suffering and inequality. They start from that simple way of thinking, but then they combine it with at least part of the improvements brought by economic reasoning and use it to search for actual solutions.
That’s one of the reasons I don’t hate social democrats, for example.