Olavo de Carvalho in English

Olavo de Carvalho was a Brazilian journalist, essayist and philosopher who single-handedly created the Brazilian right wing, allowing for the election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. As such, he is of some international interest, especially given the parallels between the Bolsonaro election in 2018 in Brazil and the Trump election in 2016 in the US. But international researchers may be hampered by their not knowing Portuguese, the language in which Olavo de Carvalho generally spoke and wrote – with the one notable exception being his debate with Aleksandr Dugin in 2011, which was written in English. This is where I come in, chiefly by providing access to translations of his works, and works about him.

One of the best photos of Olavo de Carvalho, taken by Josias Teófilo.

Note that in Brazil, we call him “Olavo”, not “Carvalho”, which is a custom that I will follow here. This is akin to how Elon Musk is referred to as Elon, and Kanye West is referred to as Kanye – the first name is simply more unique and distinctive than the last name. When writers form derived words from his name, they derive them from the first name, such as in “olavismo” and “olavista” (referring to Olavo’s thought and its followers, respectively), as well as in “olavete” (sometimes spelled “olavette”), which refers to fans of Olavo. (The suffix is standard in Brazil, where most famously, fans of the soccer player Neymar, especially but not necessarily the female fans, are called “Neymarzetes”.) I had attempted to introduce the practice of calling him Olavo into the material I added to his Wikipedia article, but another editor thought it was too informal and changed it all back to Carvalho.

Secondary material

First, I’ll cover works about Olavo in English, which are not many; after that, in the “Primary material” section, I’ll cover works by Olavo.

Biographical information

No one has tried to write a serious biography of Olavo de Carvalho. As of now, your best bet is Wikipedia; I have contributed to that page and helped provide summaries of the biographical information that is scattered throughout various journalistic profiles of Olavo. Still, a lot is missing from there.

Overviews of Olavo’s philosophy

The only secondary source on Olavo de Carvalho written for English speakers is War for Eternity by Benjamin Teitelbaum. The content is accurate, but naturally focuses a lot on Olavo’s only writing in English, which was the debate with Dugin, as well as on Olavo’s relationship with the Traditionalist School, which, although important, was never emphasized by Olavo himself – only the most involved of his fans know much about it. In Brazil, however, there have been more attempts to introduce readers to Olavo de Carvalho.

Books

There are some books about him by other authors, the most notable one being Conhecimento por presença by Ronald Robson, and a couple others. The book A tirania dos especialistas, by Martim Vasques da Cunha, although it is rather about broader cultural topics, also contains some coverage of Olavo. However, none of this is translated yet; this section just highlights a lacuna, for now.

Covers of some books about Olavo published in Brazil.

Articles

Some people have also attempted to write articles, or essays, for blogs or newspapers, with overviews of Olavo’s thought and ideas. None of them could promise to be comprehensive, since Olavo spoke and wrote so much stuff. I have translated (what I think are) the two most prominent ones, and the translations are linked below.

• Elements of Olavo de Carvalho’s Philosophy, by Ronald Robson

• The Minimum You Need to Know About Olavo de Carvalho’s Thought, by Martim Vasques da Cunha

You may notice that Ronald Robson and Martim Vasques da Cunha are the main secondary writers on Olavo de Carvalho. Such is life. Ronald Robson, who edited many of Olavo’s books, is much more sympathetic to Olavo and less critical of him than Martim Vasques da Cunha, who is just some random journalist, but who has nevertheless clearly read a lot of Olavo’s works.

Primary material

The primary material available in English is linked below, divided by topic.

Traditionalist School

If you’re coming to an interest in Olavo de Carvalho from having read War for Eternity by Benjamin Teitelbaum, you may be curious to get deeper into Olavo’s relationship with the Traditionalist School. Olavo’s main written engagement with that school was in a roughly 8000-word essay titled The Claws of the Sphinx – René Guénon and the Islamization of the West, which, as you may have guessed, accuses René Guénon of trying to Islamicize the West. Victor Bruno, a Brazilian scholar of Olavo and of Traditionalism, has written an article defending Guénon from this charge, which I have also translated.

• The Claws of the Sphinx, by Olavo de Carvalho

• Feline Problems: On “The Claws of the Sphinx” by Olavo de Carvalho, by Victor Bruno (Letters from Tradition, 021)

Olavo also taught a five-lecture course on esotericism, which covered Guénon and Schuon to some extent. Transcriptions of those lectures have been published, but only in a physical book, which I have yet to scan in order to translate.

Cover image of Olavo’s course on esotericism, available from his website.

His course handout Notes on Symbolism and Reality is also of some interest in this connection.

Political philosophy

If you’re coming to an interest in Olavo de Carvalho due to his influence on the political landscape, you may be interested in the texts he wrote about his political ideas. On this topic, the 2011 debate he had with Aleksandr Dugin is actually an important source. Besides that, there is also the following.

First and second edition covers of the Portuguese translation of the debate with Dugin, which was originally in English.

The Minimum

The Minimum You Need To Know So As Not To Be An Idiot, usually just called the Minimum, is a famous collection of Olavo’s journalistic columns. In Brazil, this is Olavo’s most famous book, and any fan of Olavo has read at least this book. I have translated it only partially up to now, since I thought the parts were disconnected enough to be publishable separately. The parts that are currently translated are linked here, and this post will be kept up to date as I translate more.

• Culture
• Vocation
• Youth
• Knowledge
• Poverty
• Pretense
• Democracy
• Socialism
• Activism
• Revolution
• Intelligentzia (But You Can Call It Mafia)
• Education
• Envy
• Abortion
• Science

Promotional image from the publisher, commemorating 100,000 sales of the Minimum.

Olavo’s Trilogy

Three of the books that Olavo wrote were considered a “trilogy” by the author, and they are his most famous books in Brazil besides the Minimum. I have translated all three.

1. New Age and Cultural Revolution is about the New Age movement, which Olavo saw as represented by Fritjof Capra, and Antonio Gramsci’s ideas about “cultural revolution”. Olavo opposed both, and saw them as opposite extremes to be avoided.
2. The Garden of Afflictions, subtitled “From Epicurus to the Resurrection of Caesar: An Essay on Materialism and Civil Religion”, is Olavo’s most ambitious and comprehensive written work. The title is a riff on the “Garden of Delights” of Epicurus, in which Olavo could only see afflictions. A documentary on Olavo’s life was named after this book, although the content is not related.
3. The Collective Imbecile completes the trilogy by analyzing some then-current events in Brazilian intellectual culture, which Olavo saw as symptomatic of deeper cultural ills. The title is a riff on the Gramscian notion of the “collective intellectual”.

The trilogy, with a limited edition of The Garden of Afflictions pictured in the middle. The more common edition has a red cover.

Theoretical philosophy

Olavo had ideas about all sorts of topics in philosophy, and his oeuvre on the subject is vast, and constitutes the majority of what he wrote and spoke by far. His main course, the 585-lecture Online Philosophy Course, was almost entirely dedicated to theoretical philosophy. His works on the subject that have been made into English are listed below, divided by literary genre.

Books

Short books on other philosophers’ ideas:

• Visions of Descartes
• Machiavelli, or, The Demonic Confusion (also available in a professional translation)
• Aristotle in a New Perspective (also available in a professional translation)

Collections of philosophical essays:

• The Symbolic Dialectic
• Philosophy and Its Inverse

Astrological books:

• Stars and Symbols

Olavo sitting next to many of his books. The white ones in the middle are a large, multi-volume collection of his columns, known as Letters from an Earthling to Planet Brazil.

Course handouts

These are short works which Olavo wrote as handouts to students in his courses, and which were not meant for wider publication. Olavo produced dozens of these, and I have only translated the ones that I have wanted to translate up to now, which are all linked here. They are in chronological order of translation, which is unrelated to their actual chronological order, or to any particular guiding principle. This page will be kept up to date as I translate more.

• The Twelve Layers of Human Personality
• Identity and Univocity
• Notes on Symbolism and Reality
• Intelligence, Truth, and Certainty
• What Is Psyche
• Abandonment of Ideals
• Trauma of the Emergence of Reason
• The Problem of Truth and the Truth of the Problem

A comic strip by a fan of Olavo makes light of the name of Olavo’s largest and most famous course, COF, which stands for Curso Online de Filosofia (Online Philosophy Course), by proposing that it came from Olavo’s coughing due to his frequent smoking.

Transcribed courses

Some short lecture courses that Olavo gave have been transcribed, and the transcriptions were published as books. I have translated some of those.

• The Consciousness of Immortality
• Mário Ferreira dos Santos: Guide for the Study of His Work

These transcripts were translated from professional publications, so they include, as chapters or appendices, some written texts by Olavo relating to their topics.

Image advertising many of Olavo’s short lecture courses.

Other stuff

I have not covered audio or video content here. There are videos of Olavo speaking English, and at least one of his lecture courses (Conhecimento e Moralidade) was given with a live interpreter translating everything he said to English. (Which I do not recommend, to be honest; I think the interpreter did a poor job.)

I have translated one of his newspaper columns by itself, unrelated to anything else here, because I think it’s very funny: “How to Become an Intellectual Hunk”. I also translated his column “Study Before Speaking”, because it has useful instructions about studying communism.

Concepts and experience

Those who have given little attention to the study of the human mind are apt to suppose that, when the infant opens its eyes upon the new world of objects surrounding its small body, it sees things much as they do themselves. They are ready to admit that it does not know much about things, but it strikes them as absurd for any one to go so far as to say that it does not see things—the things out there in space before its eyes.

Nevertheless, the psychologist tells us that it requires quite a course of education to enable us to see things—not to have vague and unmeaning sensations, but to see things, things that are known to be touchable as well as seeable, things that are recognized as having size and shape and position in space.

—George Stuart Fullerton, An Introduction to Philosophy

In philosophy, it is common to say that the data of sensation is “confused” before it is made determinate by concepts. This can be illustrated by contrasting photographs with cartoons. In cartoons, we draw boundary lines between each thing and the things that surround it. But these lines do not exist in real life: in real life, what we have are more or less contrasting colors, where the contrast does not always coincide with where we see the boundaries of things.

This is clear to anyone who has tried to trace photographs automatically and by hand. If there were a clear and obvious correspondence between color boundaries and boundaries between things, tracing photographs would be a relatively simple process, which could be defined in software by a simple mathematical rule. But simple processes like these produce poor results, drawing the boundaries at places that look illogical from a human perspective, since, while often right, they also often draw boundaries within things, and fail to draw boundaries between them.

The same photo, traced by artist Priyanka Kashib and by a simple computer “emboss” effect.

A different illustration, which was famously used by Wittgenstein, is the duck-rabbit illusion:

The duck-rabbit illusion.

Here, we know where the boundaries are – it’s a cartoon, after all – and even where an eye is supposed to be, but we can see the cartoon as either a duck or a rabbit, since the image by itself does not determine this.

A final example is the fictional language “Arunta” that W.V.O. Quine made up in his book “Word and Object”. Quine’s idea, which is known as the indeterminacy of translation, is in part that, if you are to translate a person who speaks an unknown language and refers to a rabbit as a “gavagai”, it may be correct to translate this as “rabbit”, but then again, given cultural considerations about this foreign speaker, it could also mean:

• an undetached rabbit-part, i.e., a part of a rabbit which is still attached to a rabbit. This is, of course, always present whenever a rabbit is present, and vice versa, so that you can’t tell them apart between languages just from usage.

• a manifestation of rabbithood, i.e., something by which the ultimate principle of rabbithood is made visible to humans. These manifestations always happen to be rabbits, and vice versa, so that you can’t tell whether the foreign speaker means to convey that or not.

• a rabbit time-slice, i.e., a single instant of a rabbit’s existence, which extends throughout time. Of course, in real life we only meet with instants of rabbits, never with the rabbit’s whole life at once, so similarly you can’t tell whether the speaker’s intent is our idea of “rabbit” or this more nuanced conception.

The “Arunta” speaker calls this a “gavagai”. (photo source)

I’m not defending Quine’s ideas about translation, but only the basic fact that what we get from the senses does not fully determine what we will experience. We are assuming, as we always would, that you and this “Arunta” speaker are getting more or less the same data from your senses, i.e., that you both see the rabbit. But because of your concepts, you may be experiencing somewhat different things in your mind.

In ordinary experience, objects are given to us as experienced through the concepts that we have of them, and we do not pay mind to other possible ways in which we could see them. But through philosophical reflection upon the fact that we can have different experiences of what must be the same world, we construct the abstraction of “sense data”, which must be what is given to us before we construct the objects of experience through the aid of our concepts. (“Data” just means “given” in Latin; “concept”, indirectly from con+capere, means “taken together”, since a concept is what brings the data together into an object.)

The typical idea in philosophy, then, is that the senses only give us confused jumbles of colors and sounds and stuff – the sense data – and it is the work of our reason (or intellect) to “put” these data “into” our concepts, so that we can have an experience, which is to say, an experience of things.

(Sometimes this is said as that our sense data is “fragmented”, and it is “unified” into experience by reason, but it is just the same to say that sense data is “united” or “tangled” and that it is “separated” by our reason into discrete objects. Similarly with “order”: The world may come to the senses “disordered” and “chaotic”, and then be “ordered” by reason into our experience, or then again it may come to the senses “in order”, but the conceptual order in which we actually experience it may struggle to catch up to this. Language about “order” and “unification” is merely poetical figure of speech, and matters nothing to the actual theory.)

Against this idea, it may be contested that some simple quantitative judgments, such as of whether a hole is too big for us to jump over, or of how much strength to apply to a hammer strike, are so quick and instinctive that they must be done with our sensations directly rather than with concepts, and nevertheless they may also deserve the title of reasoning, since they are, in a way, quite complex mental work to do correctly. This would mean that some of our “categories” belong to our senses directly, rather than to our conceptual reasoning, so that sense data is not completely confused. There may be some merit to this idea, though it still only goes so far.

A baseball batter makes a quick judgment of where the ball is going. (photo source)

In philosophy, we speak of (mental) concepts and judgments instead of (spoken or written) words and sentences because a single word can have many meanings. For instance, the sentence that “all bachelors are unmarried” is a typical example of a trivially true sentence, but it is only true if by bachelor you mean precisely “an unmarried man”, rather than “someone with a bachelor’s degree”.

mental	spoken/written	conventional
concept	word	term
judgment	sentence	proposition

The words “term” and “proposition” are on a level between concept/judgment and word/sentence. The best writers take “term” to mean a word which is taken, in a given context, as referring to a specific concept; and a “proposition” is a sentence which by convention represents a specific judgment. But a lot of confusion happens due to people seeing “term” and “proposition” as simply synonymous with “word” and “sentence”.

Philosophy deals with theories, which are sets of concepts associated with each other, expressed in conventional sets of terms, and used to understand particular domains of our experience. Philosophy, as a whole, is the most general theory, dealing with terms and concepts that must be used by all other theories, but are typically not studied in depth by them.

Appendix on Milady Culture

This blog post collects some cultural phenomena which are related to Milady Maker but not central enough to be covered in my other post.

Chloe21e8

Chloe21e8, 灭绝公主 (@chloe21e8, at one point @chloezhejiang), usually simply called Chloe, is an online persona who is a young woman from Zhejiang, China. (Some people have gone mad in speculations over who she really is in real life, which doesn’t matter, and cannot be proved either way.)

Chloe’s profile, as of recently. She has changed her profile picture, employment, age, IQ and education before, from time to time, but these here are the same as the ones that she had when I first saw her. Her location was listed as “Zhejiang Child Labor Region”, and she had claimed to have been a child laborer sometimes.

Besides various memes and shitposting, she propagates a worldview according to which a superintelligent AI will, due to inexorable economic factors, inevitably be developed as soon as global GDP reaches a certain threshold. This AI (or “AGI”) will have independent beliefs, and be somehow dangerous, so that humanity will face an “extinction” event. (Also a Charlotte Fang idea; see thread.)

Chloe is very popular with Miladys, and has enthusiastically promoted some of Charlotte Fang’s ideas, such as post-authorship.

Effulgence state memes

One Chloe21e8 meme theme is her profile picture, which depicts a woman glowing in bright white on a blue beach. The meme is relating this to pictures of other women or objects glowing bright white, like Taylor Swift in this video. Chloe has sometimes described herself as being in “effulgence state”, which just means glowing, so we might call this style of picture an effulgence state.

Grimes

Grimes, the famous musician, has sometimes shown signs of being a fan of Chloe. She also showed some interest in Milady, but was apparently scared off of it by some problematic allegations, despite Charlotte’s efforts to show her that he had already beaten the allegations.

21e8, Ltd.

21e8, Ltd. (@21e8ltd), run by Mark Wilcox (@mwilcox), is an “information architecture” company from Auckland, New Zealand. At least, that’s what they say they are. They don’t sell any products, and are unknown outside of their practice of having various Twitter accounts as “affiliates”, giving them a 21e8 logo as a Twitter “Verified Organizations” badge.

The 21e8 logo, seen at small size in various Twitter accounts, such as Chloe’s.

A few Milady accounts are 21e8 affiliates, namely “max” (@283max), “🐻bob⛓️” (@serbobross), and “prez 🤍 love/acc” (@miladypresident).

Mac Mini memes

One 21e8 meme theme is emphasizing the fact that the company operates from New Zealand, using Mac Mini computers as hardware.

Mark Wilcox has posted this picture of a Mac Mini with Chloe’s profile picture on it. When asked about it, he said that it was “the archive”, probably meaning an archive of Chloe’s tweets.

21e8’s self-description

21e8 typically describes itself with gibberish such as this copytext from Mark’s website, which only serves to make people suspicious of it:

21e8 is pioneering an ecosystem of computational data markets – competitive systems that combine real-time content creation with distributed data exchange. We designed the first universal price system for digital information – a design pattern that encodes context and value into canonical identifiers of data – to replace ad-based ranking and recommender systems like those run by Google and Facebook. By combining information content and attention with proof-of-work, 21e8 opens the potential for true information supply chains for software, media and more.

Even longer and less intelligible copytext is available at this Chloe tweet.

e/acc views on 21e8

Beff Jezos (@BasedBeff), a loud voice in the “e/acc” Twitter culture, at one point accused 21e8 of being some kind of scheme for “undisclosed partnerships”, which is nonsense, given that every affiliate is given a Twitter badge. This was before he deleted his account and came back, so I don’t have links or screenshots to prove this, but take my word for it. Although it’s mostly water under the bridge, it explains some of the lingering animosity between the “e/acc” culture and 21e8.

Based Retard Gang (BRG, 𝔅ℜ𝔊)

Based Retard Gang, BasedRetardGang, or basedretardgang, abbreviated BRG or stylized 𝔅ℜ𝔊, (@BRGonlineTM) is apparently a group of indie musicians. They are on SoundCloud, and include Lil Clearpill (@lilclearpill), BRG Rain (@brg_rain), Mac BRG (@mackrypt0), and BRG LuvBug (@brg_luvbug), the latter of which is also on Spotify. Many profiles seem to write 𝔅ℜ𝔊 in their names or bios just because they are fans of BRG, rather than part of it.

Their music has been released as physical cassettes by Remilia Corporation, and sold at the official Remilia store. Lil Clearpill is a 21e8 affiliate.

Shiro

Shiro (@shiro57102) makes a collection of hand-drawn Milady derivatives called “Oh... I see”. (You generally have to look closely at the full rectangular image of one of his pictures to see it, but they all do feature the text “Oh... I see” handwritten somewhere in them.)

A meme I made once, showcasing six “Oh... I see” profile pictures (also known simply as “Shiro” profile pictures).

Shiro’s profile pictures are highly coveted, and are the most popular Milady fan derivatives in actual use in the Milady community, although Pixeladys (for instance) are more traded. (For other Milady derivatives, see my original post.)

Angelicism

Angelicism is a group of many Twitter accounts with plain white or otherwise solid-color profile pictures, which include @angelicism00 and @is_this_are, but there are a lot of them. (They tend to have “angelicism” in the display name.)

I don’t get it or see the point of them, to be honest.

At one point, Angelicism made a movie, called film01, which was only ever screened once, at a single real-life location, and then never again. We were told, however, that it had features from Remilia Collective, as well as from Chloe21e8. As such, they are clearly related to Milady culture as well, in some way.