Abstract:
Based on Hobbes’ concept that the human creature needs to invest effort, work and effort to overcome to bring out its values (which corroborate with the classical Christian precept of sacrifice), and adopting the principle that the nation emerges before the State through a natural and spontaneous selection of common interests and customs, it is possible to identify, from Brazilian origins, the absence of a vector which could help the individual to understand him or herself as a fundamental part of a cohesive collective which values the virtues of discipline, of order, of punctuality, of cooperation, of mutual respect and of solicitude. According to Hobbes, this incongruity in the original structure promotes fear and distrust of the neighbor co-citizen and of the institutionalized power; it weakens citizenship and ethics. In the effort to self-organize itself, the Brazilian state is encountering difficulties in overcoming the bad customs and in establishing the predominance of good habits. The continual social injustice, from birth, has its greatest symbol in corruption, which results in unhappiness and moral degradation, elements which keep the people in a condition of being a mass. This paper proposes a rereading of the origin of Brazilian society seeking in the hermeneutics of Ricoeur to propitiate a greater sharpness in looking at oneself as the first Other. By this method we seek to strengthen the relation between individuals of a social web based on the recognition of oneself as the first Other citizen. For this it is necessary to scrutinize one’s values and deficiencies which need to be overcome. When the challenge to overcome injustice and mediocrity through the Socratic affirmation “know yourself” is clear, the individual can motivate him or herself and can compel him or herself to the practice of the good customs of Aristotelian ethics, incremented by the awareness of the social dividends guaranteed by the moral duty of Kant. Spontaneous obedience to the rules of the State can only occur through the internalization of its concepts by understanding them as good for oneself. This is the vector that is directly opposite of corruption.
