A horde that does not know its history dies of cold. It falls to each horde, in its territoriality, to elect — within its particular strategic conditions — its contemporary enemy; to identify, in the slow ossification of actions, the points of clotting of the herd. A quick glance through Brazilian history suffices to establish that it is not in terms of structuring and legitimizing a political authority that the Brazilian State is lacking: Brazil achieved this, in one way or another, at various moments in its history. A quick glance through Brazilian history also suffices to establish that it was, in its great majority, conducted by the herd. All the modes of perpetuation and management of the herd leap immediately to the eye: the hollow shell of interminable institutional arrangements, the excesses of constitutional clauses, the machine of perverse incentives grounded in tax extraction, vote-buying, and excess of inefficient regulation. We would not need to read the monumental work of Raymundo Faoro to see, in the ossification of the Estamento, the Brazilian configuration of herd administration.
For each historical period subjected to analysis, an uncomfortable constancy: whenever the country ventured a significant change and transformation, it was the dynamism of an individual or group of highly organized individuals that — despite the entire institutional chain — managed to impose, against the tide of the times, a harmonizing direction. After success, the same factor of decline: from colonial latifundia to republican bureaucracy, every institutional structure, in order to perpetuate itself, organizes around itself a model of extractive state capture aligned with the renewal of positional advantages — while failing, however, to give oxygen to the new organizational arrangement. Lack of organization, talent, will, and training slide, as always, into the incapacity for action — the political form of the herd.
As Nietzsche said, evolution is often regressive. Brazilian history is laden with examples of incomparable analytical value that would serve as case studies to temporarily structure the political strategy of a new horde. For the objectives of our work, only a few examples would suffice. Marquis of Pombal, who effectively governed Portugal from 1750 to 1777 during the reign of José I, illuminates the efficient impetus of a new horde when it seizes power. His entire program could be described as the occupation and then efficient conversion of the territory’s physical stock — trade routes, colonial resources, networks of contacts and information — into a dynamic yet centralized human and institutional stock capable of generating the economic and productive structure necessary for the impulse and dominance of the Portuguese empire. The creation of the Commercial Companies is an example of territorial circumscriptions via autarchic and monopolistic dynamization: it organizes geographically strategic industries to potentialize, through the management of territory and human capital, the effective action capacities. One could argue that Commercial Companies are not an entirely adequate mechanism for the contemporary world, marked by the globalization of the digital, financial, and nuclear economy. But the creation of Sovereign Wealth Funds targeting strategic Brazilian sectors with concentrated physical stock — such as thorium energy, national semiconductor production, AI databases and language, as well as modular biofactories and synthetic biology — coupled with a consistent educational reform capable of forming a technical-cybernetic elite able to replace the banking oligarchy, the media complex, and the bureaucratic-juridical statist inertia, would already direct us toward an organic configuration of more reliable performance.
But despite the effects of Pombal’s policies, in the Brazilian case it is the Jesuits who are the best examples of horde politics. It was the Jesuit experience that most comprehensively addressed the task of forming a technical and erudite elite-horde capable of successfully administering territories as gigantic and dispersed as those of colonial Brazil were at the time. Their philosophy was that the ruler, and the entire political class, should be governed and oriented by constancy — a constancy that could only come from a rational and disciplined commitment to ends and duties that transcend the volatility of circumstances and the immediate seduction of passions. The Jesuit program had as its objective the cultivation of a practical reason and wisdom that could only be attained through a systematic training of resistance to immediate passions and desires, producing a position of reflection immune to any and all emotional instability. The formation of a new architecture for a new horde in Brazil could not dispense with a new Ratio Studiorum whose objective would be to fulfill the same goals that Jesuit education originally fulfilled: the production of an erudite and technical elite capable of self-control and discipline, freed from excesses and apt to make rapid decisions even under great pressure. The formative content would need to be updated: beyond a robust classical formation — with knowledge of Latin and Greek and philosophical and historical mastery, instruments of swift and cohesive reasoning — mathematical calculus and formal logic would need to be allied with programming and cybernetics, with the study of economics and robotics, thermodynamics and game theory, as well as the most useful notions of biotechnology and geopolitics.
Only a new post-Jesuit horde could thus guide the financial channeling of neo-Pombaline Sovereign Funds toward the physical stocks of greatest strategic value, since this presupposes the real and effective occupation of the territory and the capacity for appropriation and active utilization of its resources. „The sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception“; and the territory is that space effectively occupied by the exercise of power of a sovereign authority, as Alexandre de Gusmão would say (1750). The inability of a state to manage its spatial force, compensated by the weakness of the juridical demarcations of a territory, had already been foreshadowed in Brazilian history when Gusmão defended, against the „imaginary lines“ of the Treaty of Tordesillas, the so-called Uti possidetis — the real appropriation of the soil and its products through massive investments in its infrastructure. In the economy of the digital-spatial era, the sovereign of the horde cannot dispense with Uti possidetis and its current configuration, the Uti conectitis: a great web of data flow connected by submarine cables, a great route of commercial flow through new logistical corridors, a great channeling of energy flow through new transmission networks, a great current of information flow through dominance of orbital constellations.
Without a power capable of preventing the fragmentation of a territory inefficiently occupied and disaggregated into vast dysfunctional patches commanded by oligarchic factions, it is impossible to build a vigorous institutional and civilizational design capable of executing this task. As in the horde’s thermo-politics, the Brazilian territory must also be understood primarily in mineralogical and thermodynamic terms, in order then to be orchestrated around a common center of gravity. Separated and rationed into areas supplying strategic raw materials, traversed by rivers, springs, and trade routes, the Brazilian territory demands a centralized power capable of skillfully allocating human capital in the elaboration of its resources. This was none other than the objective of the Moderating Power of the Constitution of 1824: to establish a power that could arbitrate and manage, appoint and dissolve inefficient governmental structures, so as to avoid both rigidity and ineptitude, both arbitrary judgment held hostage by interests and impulsive, unreflective actions dictated by popular pressure. The updating of Bonifácio’s political theory for the future of the horde would require the figure of a new Modern Horde-Moderating Power, capable of executing the actions necessary for the long term through the development of a territorial unit grounded in energy infrastructure. In herd politics, every decision requires the formation of a coalition, the payment of parallel agreements, the asymmetric management of information, backroom deals between powers, satisfaction of the median voter. In horde politics, the chaotic myriad of agents is compelled to follow a direction, to take a form — and one need only observe Brazilian electoral politics since 1988 to perceive it, regardless of ideological orientation, as a systematic exhaustion of infrastructure investments accompanied by the continuous dilapidation of social security funds, thus permitting the irresponsible increase of the public debt and, consequently, the degradation of the institutional capacity of technically sophisticated agencies (Petrobras, Embraer under the participation regime, BNDES under various governments) — all to finance the clientelism networks necessary for the formation and maintenance of parliamentary majorities.
The lesson for a new functional governmental architecture is therefore precise: avoid the horde’s fall, regenerate or govern the foci of herd, that is, avoid the displacement of a cohesive and technically capable decision-making structure — one that rewards and penalizes leaders with an incentive structure that obliges them to bear the consequences of their choices — toward an inefficient class that exercises power in an immediateist manner, without formal accountability and internalization of the externalities of its actions. Beyond the aforementioned updating of the Ratio Studiorum and its rigorous intellectual formation, the new ruling horde must institute an equally demanding selection process. Admission to what we would call the École Normale Supérieure of Politics — a variation of the Instituto Rio Branco, the training body for the Brazilian diplomatic corps — must replicate the Jesuit method of evaluating competence and character at each stage of formation (the model of annual evaluation by superiors was a continuous performance management system) — beginning with the candidacy itself, open to all, where the examination system must be allied with the psychic, intellectual, and emotional assessments of the candidates.
It is after training at the École Supérieure that the individual receives their first administrative functions, and must pass through governmental approval and be elected by the population — from a pre-stipulated list of the best candidates for the position — to assume the highest posts. These, in turn, will be those responsible for the management of High-Processing Economic Zones: large tracts of land corresponding to the strategic mapping of resources to be dynamized and processed in order to increase the productive capacity of the country and the region, endowed with state incentives, tax-free status, and mandatory technology transfer — in conjunction with municipalities and states in their current configuration. A periodic evaluation system must be administered to each sitting leader, detecting their propensity for excesses, their greater or lesser degree of psychic vulnerability to environmental influences, as well as the early signs of „functional decline“ — when the individual begins to prioritize job security over innovation and efficiency in the development of their operational territory. Their benefits will be equally proportional to their commitment, and they must demonstrate, within stipulated timeframes, objective and measurable results of governance (health, education, infrastructure). A significant portion of their compensation will be paid in government bonds, whose value only grows if the country becomes more productive, efficient, and secure. The Moderator shall be elected in council, by the unanimous decision of all Ministers, former leaders of the High-Processing Zones, having, for this purpose, both attained certain production and administrative efficiency quotas, as well as the necessary intellectual and moral rigor.
For the new Brazilian horde, an effective economic policy — productive, industrial, technological — means dynamizing the country’s genuine strategic moats in its comparative advantages. The most significant of these moats, and the least explored, is the thorium resource base. Brazil holds reserves estimated among the largest on Earth, and the peculiar nuclear properties of thorium make it, perhaps, the basis of what may be the most significant energy technology not yet implemented at scale. The Sovereign Wealth Funds targeting thorium energy would operate by Pombaline logic: sovereign capital taking controlling stakes in strategic sectors, with national returns and long-term investment decisions insulated from the immediateist pressure for quarterly results. As Bonifácio pointed out, energy is the vital force of sovereignty. Surpassing the unstable dependence on hydroelectric energy, a sovereign Brazil must pioneer Molten Salt Reactors fed by its enormous thorium reserves. Energy at near-zero marginal cost is the path toward the new cybernetic-sidereal economy of the robotized horde.
Only with an energetically strong economy, based on Molten Salt Reactors and its large thorium reserves, could Brazil irrigate and enable the efficient exploitation of its other strategic moats: the construction of a Global Space Hub from the Alcântara launch base, building a production system for Low Earth Orbit satellites, spatial databases, and orbital computational infrastructure; the preservation and technological investigation of the Amazon for the formation of a biotechnology hub, genetic medicine, and nano-biomolecular materials science; the development of a techno-agricultural center in the midwest regions with a new extraction system for aquifer assets; the construction of a high-complexity financial and cybernetic nucleus for the production of nanotechnology, AI software, and semiconductors in the southeast region. To increase yield and potentialize investment, the State could issue bonds or create a programmable blockchain asset that would function as a direct stake in the productive power of each of the zones or of the nation as a whole. The high energy supply capacities generated by Molten Salt Reactors would gradually replace current hydroelectric supply to neighboring countries. A transcontinental rail network linking the ports of Santos and Paranaguá, on the Atlantic, to the Peruvian and Chilean ports on the Pacific — crossing Paraguay, Bolivia, and the Andean routes — would achieve the physical integration of the continent in a regional industrial complex centered on Brazil. As Brazil’s technological production advanced, in parallel with the power grid, the construction of a fiber optic network — in conjunction with the satellite constellation — would connect South American capitals through terrestrial and submarine cables, providing the commercial circuit with genuine intelligence infrastructure.
Brazil’s defense program would need to be expanded; and the PROSUB — the development of nuclear-powered submarines — should be integrated into a broader naval industrial complex: autonomous underwater vehicles for deep-ocean mineral exploration and more advanced sonar systems. In the aeronautical sphere, Embraer’s defense division would provide the foundation for an expanded drone development program that, combined with Avibras‘ rocket and missile manufacturing and Alcântara’s intelligence infrastructure, would finally give projection and precision to the air defense system.
The horde is a founder of cities; and an architecturally coherent and harmonious city is the result of a horde’s vigor: it coordinates, as we have said, space to foster the virtues necessary for the appropriation of a territory. The horde knows that Beauty is also a matter of power: the power to give form and harmony to a set of disparate forces in continuous contention. Every new horde erects a form upon which it expresses its power. A new Brazilian horde cannot renounce a new cultural and civilizational architecture. It gives beautiful forms to its forms of self-cultivation. An entire urbanization and spatial redimensioning policy would need to be implemented to give concreteness to its new ordering impulse: great monuments, cities planned with wide avenues and large architectural complexes built to endure. It would not be strange to see a new Baroque of the spatial age as the new aesthetic proposal of the horde.
It was Kondratieff who said that cycles of transformative fluctuation occur every 40 to 60 years. Whether this calculation can be verified or not, the fact is that we live in a period of historical latency — the historical latency of the horde. The Goddess History awakens from her deep sleep. The Gods are Thirsty. It falls to the Brazilian pack to manage to wake from its drowsiness, or else sleep once and for all.
