Prudence dictates: before employing a means of social control – political, economic, legal – it is necessary to know its genesis, perfections or weaknesses. In “winning plea bargains”, the result of anything but holy inquisitions, such precautions are forgotten. The prisoner, to escape the acts of faith led by judges, prosecutors and police officers who should be neutral, confesses to acts and words that are little subject to factual and subjective control. Motives brought about by the lowest passions are no longer reviewed. Negative affects are as old as humanity. And its analysis goes back thousands of years. It is no coincidence that in religious speeches, the agent of hatred and disunity is called the Devil, the turbulent informer. He acted in Athens, Rome, in the inquisition (the terrible Monitor demanding general denunciation, by the Portuguese inquisitor Dom Diogo da Silva, in 1536), under absolutism (Lacôte-Fernades, H. Les processes du cardinal de Richelieu, 2010), in totalitarian regimes. Brazilian dictatorships had a versatile assistant in him.
Immense volumes welcome the examination of shameful practices in the political order. The infamous story defines conflicting cultures, states, creeds. In the arsenal of baseness, two items deserve greater caution, slander and whistleblowing. For the slanderous accusation, it is worth returning to the Apology of Socrates (19a – 19 b). The accusatory piece (Diabolé) incriminates the philosopher for alleged sophistry. The thinker would transform weak arguments into strong ones, at the same time as he investigated subterranean and celestial entities. In the indictment we have an essay on ancient hunts against scientific research. The term used to hurt Socrates refers to the Zetesis the search for natural or historical phenomena. The accusation joins the slander according to which the defendant corrupts the youth of Athens, teaching impiety. Exile or hemlock, the sentence was already acting on Meletos' hardened index finger. Denouncement and slander, faces of the same behavior.
Plato cites several examples of slanderous speech. At Republic (489d) outrage against practitioners of philosophy is indicated. According to the indictment (Diabolé), anyone who dedicates themselves to that study is perverted or useless. Philosophy itself can be slandered if the practitioner shows himself unworthy of it (Card 7, 329b). The philosopher differentiates testimony, denunciation, slander (Laws, 937 a – e). In the State to be established according to justice “If someone is caught multiplying processes unduly (...), anyone can accuse them of perverse procedure or assistance in perverse procedure. He will be tried by the High Court.” If guilty, “it must be seen whether he acted out of avarice or ambition for glory. If you are a foreigner, you will be banned if you relapse. In the case of a citizen, dead.” Capital punishment is an antidote to the plethora of lawsuits and accusations that make collective life hell. Plato remembers the plays of Aristophanes, especially The Wasps. Nela, The plaintiffs and their attacks swell the city with chicanery aimed at financial or political targets. In such an environment, the sycophant has his splendid birth. Aristophanes pursues individual and collective defects, making people laugh. Plato ridicules attitudes he considers harmful. (O'Gorman, Diderot the satirist, but also David Bouvier : “Platon et les poètes : peut-on rire de Socrate?” in Desclos, ML Ed. Le rire des Grecs, anthropologie du rire in ancient Greece).
A well-known satirical writer is Luciano de Samosata. His texts offer an arsenal against human foolishness and misery, in a diaphanous style that marked Renaissance and modern culture. Just think about how much Erasmus, Rabelais, Thomas More. Denis Diderot nurtured him. Works like The Praise of Madness e Rameau's Nephew would be unthinkable without Luciano. (JL Brandão : The poetics of the hypocentaur - Literature, society and fictional discourse in Luciano de Samosata Editora UFMG and R. Romano, Silence and Noise, satire in Denis Diderot, Ed. Unicamp).
A burning piece by Luciano has the following title: On Delation (Diabolé) that should not be believed in a hasty manner, translated into Latin by Guarino de Verona at the beginning of the 400s (Calumniae non temere credendum). The most recent Oxford editor claims the text is “pure rhetoric.” But very cruel rhetoric nonetheless, as it examines the terrible behavior present in the accusation. A 19th century French editor emphasizes: “Diabolé is commonly translated as slander; but such exegesis is false. The title itself proves it. Luciano would not say that slander should not be welcomed lightly, as You are never we must believe it, since slander is a false accusation. Diabolé means slander, true or false noises spread against an enemy, in the desire to harm him”. The text attacks slanderous reporting and the speed with which it spreads. When Brazilian allegations are made and leaked at a speed similar to that of a jet, with lightness and haste, it is worth keeping the warning in mind.
Luciano uses the story of the painter Apeles, who suffered a plea bargain from Antifilo, an envious rival of his talent and prestige with Ptolemy. There was in fact an attempted coup in Tira against the leader. Apeles had never been to that city, he did not know the putschist Theodotas, who he only knew was an assistant to Ptolemy. But Antifilo convinced the almost deposed man by insinuating that Apeles had been seen in Phenicia at lunch with Theodotas, whispering in his ears. Therefore, the coup attempt would have been inspired by....Apeles! Accustomed to flattery, Ptolemy did not weigh vital elements of the denunciation: it came from a rival of Apeles, Apeles himself had no political importance to inspire a coup d'état, Apeles had never been to Tira. The accused was saved by an arrested scammer who, disgusted by the baseness displayed by Antifilo, declared that the painter knew nothing about the scam. Ptolemy assumed Apeles' innocence and gave him a cash reward and Antiphilus as a slave. But the artist's greatest revenge came when he painted a painting, whose title is precisely “The Delation”. In the Renaissance the motif was taken up by Botticelli (“The Slander of Apeles”). Leon Battista Alberti addresses the topic in By Pictura (3, 53-54).
Luciano describes the painting as follows: “on the right is a man with large ears, similar to those of Midas. He extends his arm to Delation. Two women appear next to him, one similar to the Ignorance, the other with Suspicion. On the other side we see Delation walking in the form of a perfectly beautiful young woman, her face inflamed, subjected to anger and hatred. In one hand she wields the burning torch, with the other, she plucks the hair of a young man who raises his arms to the sky and seems to take the gods as a witness. A pale and disfigured man leads her. His fixed and dark look, his extreme rickets, remind us of patients emaciated by long abstinence. We recognize it: it is the Ienvy. Two other women follow Delation, encourage her, fix her clothes and take care of the decorations. One is the Conspiracy ( Epiboulé ) and the other, Fraud (Apatē) accompanied from afar by another woman whose face announces pain, dressed in black, clothes torn. We have Repentance (Metanoia). She cries, turns her head and looks at the Truth in confusion (Alētheia) that comes to meet you.” In Brazil, a painting like this would bring another allegorical character: the cadaverous presumption of innocence.
With description (ékphrasis) vivid, in which he collects ethical points, especially the negative ones, Luciano defines the denunciation. “A type of clandestine accusation made in the absence and without the knowledge of the accused, to which a third party gives faith because there is only one statement, without a contradictor”. In the ancient history of infamy, we left Greece and arrived in Brazil. Denunciation implies bad faith on the part of those who initiate it, those who listen, those who judge, those who accuse. The whistleblower cannot be a good person, because honest people do not harm or inform, but act for the collective good. The whistleblower is unfair, before and after reporting, he is an enemy of the law and dangerous for those who frequent him. The person who uses the clandestine weapon of denunciation against others steals the ears of auditors, to close them to statements that contradict them. Solon and Draco force judges to listen to the other side in cases. It is blasphemous to welcome only the accuser, without listening to the accused. Denunciation, continues Luciano, “violates justice, the law and the oath of judges”. In times of award-winning Brazilian plea bargains, it is worth re-reading the text, a source of prudence and ethical rectitude.
I will return to the topic, revisiting authors who dealt with the subject. According to the news about the “fight against corruption”, it seems that many Brazilians, in society and in the State, instead of prudence, imitate Ptolemy. They hastily pronounce guilt before examining the completeness of the facts and the law. Immanuel Kant places the examination of the facts with the greatest possible rigor. And with no less rigor, listen the laws that sanction them, positively or negatively. This lesson is rejected by the media, justice and public opinion. Such “forgetfulness” is yet another cancer in our hideous ethics and diabolical institutional framework.
