Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira

From one end of the country to the other we hear about the necessity of "reforms in the socio economic structures." Insistence in this respect is taking on the shades of a spectre of a genuine maneuver of revolutionary psychological warfare, for when the formula   hammered in with the insistence of a slogan   is well examined it reveals itself as going one way but not the other.

Here the word reform is used in an undefined sense. It doesn't specify whether it's heading toward the left or the right. However, in reality almost all those who use it show that by means of it they have in view only egalitarian changes. Some more. Some less. But, ultimately, all of them egalitarian.

The clamor for these reforms is becoming a real broad public opinion front, forming one single impulse for all those who want a new world a little less distant from the communist world than the present one. Some want this distance loss to be quick and radical, and others want it to be slow and discreet. And still others want it to be almost infinitesimal. But in any case, it is lessening the distance.

It is as though in Rio de Janeiro a physical effort sufficiently great to move Sugarloaf Mountain were put together. Some of those contributing to this global effort would only want to dislocate it a few millimeters. Others more categorical, some centimeters. And so it would go on, until a minority would want to hurl it into the depths of the sea. In order to do this, all those partisan to upsetting the present equilibrium of the giant monolith would be indiscriminately allied, for they all concur on what is essential, which is to tilt the colossal rock in whatever direction. Once they were to get it tottering, it would be easier to find the right moment to cast it into the ocean.

The current state of affairs is comparable to Sugarloaf. For those who want to hurl it into the abyss of communism what is important is to start it tottering. And to do this the uproar can admirably unite in favor of changes in structure, all the more so since, as I said, this clamor emphasizes a formula which goes only one way, that is, toward egalitarianism, at the extreme of which is communism.

In our days, in which the socioeconomic hierarchy is being shaken, diluted, corrupted, and contested even by many of those who hold high positions in it, it would be good to include in the list of reforms at least some measures that reinforce this hierarchy. But whoever were to propose this in a meeting of reformists would have the united front of all those present against him. Just like someone who had driven a car the wrong way down a busy one-way street.

These observations suggest caution in relation to the current reformist wave. Caution which could take shape in a very simple attitude, that is, to ask each reformist to clearly define what reforms he wants. The mutual disagreements between the reformists would then become patent.

It would be the same thing as to break a wave into a thousand tiny drops ...

In proposing such a position, I should in turn make my own position precise. I don't want to be misunderstood.

Before anything else, I want to state that I am not hostile to every kind of reform. But I do not want reform to be seen as a means to do unilateral justice to the poor against the rich, or to the rich against the poor. Because, en passant, the rich also have rights, even ... to be rich. Unilateral justice is just as absurd as a scale with one arm taken off.

On the other hand, from the fact that all egalitarian regimes are intrinsically unjust, I do not conclude that all inequality is necessarily just. I even think that the capitalist socio economic structures tend to create inequalities so immense that they play the game of egalitarianism. If all the private enterprise in a country as large as Brazil were to end up being owned by a group of one or two thousand plutocrats, the consequence would produce an imbalance in which either they would dominate the State, or the State would dominate them. The string would naturally break at the weakest point.

The masses, uninterested in maintaining the principle of private property, would remain indolent or perhaps even become enthusiastic if the State were to attack this microcosm of supernabobs. And how easy it would be for the State to do this, armed as it is with the thousand means made available today by publicity, financial, fiscal and police techniques!

So the height of inequality would be the last step to total equality. And there is nothing more useful in maintaining legitimate inequalities than to preserve them whole and thriving, though proportionate to the natural order of things.

We should nonetheless require those reformists who currently follow the socio cconomic new look to be explicit and precise; those among them who do not want to be useful innocents or fellow travelers of communism to get out of the wave; and those who want to be one or the other to frankly say so. In this case, they will not wait long to find out how many there are from the top to the bottom of the social scale who repudiate them as cohorts of the greatest enemy of Christian Civilization.

Note: Translated from "Veritas", november 1979.