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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Paulo Freire
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January 5 - June 3, 2022
This adherence was not easy; it required bravery on the part of the leaders to love the people sufficiently to be willing to sacrifice themselves for them. It required courageous witness by the leaders to recommence after each disaster, moved by undying hope in a future victory which (because forged together with the people) would belong not to the leaders alone, but to the leaders and the people—or to the people, including the leaders.
it is not easy for leaders who have emerged through adherence to the oppressed to recognize themselves as being in contradiction with those to whom they adhered.
They interpret a certain historical moment of the people’s consciousness as evidence of their intrinsic deficiency. Since the leaders need the adherence of the people so that the revolution can be achieved (but at the same time mistrust the mistrustful people), they are tempted to utilize the same procedures used by the dominant elites to oppress. Rationalizing their lack of confidence in the people, the leaders say that it is impossible to dialogue with the people before taking power, thus opting for the antidialogical theory of action. Thenceforward—just like the dominant elites—they try to
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The role of revolutionary leadership (under any circumstances, but especially so in those described) is to consider seriously, even as they act, the reasons for any attitude of mistrust on the part of the people, and to seek out true avenues of communion with them, ways of helping the people to help themselves critically perceive the reality which oppresses them.
What distinguishes revolutionary leaders from the dominant elite is not only their objectives, but their procedures. If they act in the same way, the objectives become identical. It is as self-contradictory for the dominant elites to pose human-world relations as problems to the people as it is for the revolutionary leaders not to do so.
In the theory of antidialogical action, conquest (as its primary characteristic) involves a Subject who conquers another person and transforms her or him into a “thing.” In the dialogical theory of action, Subjects meet in cooperation in order to transform the world.
If at a certain historical moment the oppressed, for the reasons previously described, are unable to fulfill their vocation as Subjects, the posing of their very oppression as a problem (which always involves some form of action) will help them achieve this vocation.
It means merely that the leaders—in spite of their important, fundamental, and indispensable role—do not own the people and have no right to steer the people blindly towards their salvation.
Dialogue, as essential communication, must underlie any cooperation.
Dialogue does not impose, does not manipulate, does not domesticate, does not “sloganize.” This does not mean, however, that the theory of dialogical action leads nowhere; nor does it mean that the dialogical human does not have a clear idea of what she wants, or of the objectives to which she is committed.
Conquered adherence is not adherence; it is “adhesion” of the vanquished to the conqueror, who prescribes the options open to the former.
Let me reemphasize that posing reality as a problem does not mean sloganizing: it means critical analysis of a problematic reality.
The adherence of the people is made possible by this unveiling of the world and of themselves, in authentic praxis.
People have to grasp who, what, when, and where they are.
The leaders must believe in the potentialities of the people, whom they cannot treat as mere objects of their own action; they must believe that the people are capable of participating in the pursuit of liberation.
Although trust is basic to dialogue, it is not an a priori condition of the latter; it results from the encounter in which persons are co-Subjects in denouncing the world, as part of the world’s transformation. But as long as the oppressor “within” the oppressed is stronger than they themselves are, their natural fear of freedom may lead them to denounce the revolutionary leaders instead!
communion with the people was decisive for the transformation of a “spontaneous and somewhat lyrical decision into a more serene force, one of an entirely different value.”
What Guevara did not say, perhaps due to humility, is that it was his own humility and capacity to love that made possible his communion with the people.
In dialogical theory, at no stage can revolutionary action forgo communion with the people. Communion in turn elicits cooperation, which brings leaders and people to the fusion described by Guevara. This fusion can exist only if revolutionary action is really human, empathetic, loving, communicative, and humble, in order to be liberating.
The revolution loves and creates life; and in order to create life it may be obliged to prevent some men from circumscribing life.
Whereas in the antidialogical theory of action the dominators are compelled by necessity to divide the oppressed, the more easily to preserve the state of oppression, in the dialogical theory the leaders must dedicate themselves to an untiring effort for unity among the oppressed—and unity of the leaders with the oppressed—in order to achieve liberation.
The praxis of oppression is easy (or at least not difficult) for the dominant elite; but it is not easy for the revolutionary leaders to carry out a liberating praxis. The former group can rely on using the instruments of power; the latter group has this power directed against it.
The latter group cannot exist without the people, and this very condition constitutes the first obstacle to its efforts at organization.
The individual is divided between an identical past and present, and a future without hope. He or she is a person who does not perceive himself or herself as becoming; hence cannot have a future to be built in unity with others. But as he or she breaks this “adhesion” and objectifies the reality from which he or she starts to emerge, the person begins to integrate as a Subject (an I) confronting an object (reality). At this moment, sundering the false unity of the divided self, one becomes a true individual.
the object of dialogical action is to make it possible for the oppressed, by perceiving their adhesion, to opt to transform an unjust reality.
Men who are bound to nature and to the oppressor in this way must come to discern themselves as persons prevented from being.
Any attempt to unify the peasants based on activist methods which rely on “slogans” and do not deal with these fundamental aspects produces a mere juxtaposition of individuals, giving a purely mechanistic character to their action.
The unity of the oppressed occurs at the human level, not at the level of things.
In order for the oppressed to unite, they must first cut the umbilical cord of magic and myth which binds them to the world of oppression; the unity which links them to each other must be of a different nature.
Only forms of action which avoid mere speech-making and ineffective “blah” on the one hand, and mechanistic activism on the other, can also oppose the divisive action of the dominant elites and move towards the unity of the oppressed.
Organization is not only directly linked to unity, but is a natural development of that unity.
Since these dimensions of witness are historical, dialogical, and therefore dialectical, witness cannot simply import them from other contexts without previously analyzing its own. To do otherwise is to absolutize and mythologize the relative; alienation then becomes unavoidable.
The essential elements of witness which do not vary historically include: consistency between words and actions; boldness which urges the witnesses to confront existence as a permanent risk; radicalization (not sectarianism) leading both the witnesses and the ones receiving that witness to increasing action; courage to love (which, far from being accommodation to an unjust world, is rather the transformation of that world in behalf of the increasing liberation of humankind); and faith in the people, since it is to them that witness is made—although witness to the people, because of their
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Witness which has not borne fruit at a certain moment and under certain conditions is not thereby rendered incapable of bearing fruit tomorrow.
There is no freedom without authority, but there is also no authority without freedom. All freedom contains the possibility that under special circumstances (and at different existential levels) it may become authority. Freedom and authority cannot be isolated, but must be considered in relationship to each other.
Just as authority cannot exist without freedom, and vice versa, authoritarianism cannot exist without denying freedom, nor license without denying authority.
Cultural action either serves domination (consciously or unconsciously) or it serves the liberation of men and women. As these dialectically opposed types of cultural action operate in and upon the social structure, they create dialectical relations of permanence and change.
Cultural synthesis is thus a mode of action for confronting culture itself, as the preserver of the very structures by which it was formed.
The investigation of the people’s generative themes or meaningful thematics described in chapter 3 constitutes the starting point for the process of action as cultural synthesis.
Investigation—the first moment of action as cultural synthesis—establishes a climate of creativity which will tend to develop in the subsequent stages of action. Such a climate does not exist in cultural invasion, which through alienation kills the creative enthusiasm of those who are invaded, leaving them hopeless and fearful of risking experimentation, without which there is no true creativity.
Those who are invaded, whatever their level, rarely go beyond the models which the invaders prescribe for them. In cultural synthesis there are no invaders; hence, there are no imposed models.
Knowledge of the alienated culture leads to transforming action resulting in a culture which is being freed from alienation. The more sophisticated knowledge of the leaders is remade in the empirical knowledge of the people, while the latter is refined by the former.
Revolutionary leaders must avoid organizing themselves apart from the people; whatever contradiction to the people may occur fortuitously, due to certain historical conditions, must be solved—not augmented by the cultural invasion of an imposed relationship. Cultural synthesis is the only way.
Revolutionary leaders commit many errors and miscalculations by not taking into account something so real as the people’s view of the world: a view which explicitly and implicitly contains their concerns, their doubts, their hopes, their way of seeing the leaders, their perceptions of themselves and of the oppressors, their religious beliefs (almost always syncretic), their fatalism, their rebellious reactions. None of these elements can be seen separately, for in interaction all of them compose a totality. The oppressor is interested in knowing this totality only as an aid to his action of
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Neither invasion by the leaders of the people’s world view nor mere adaptation by the leaders to the (often naive) aspirations of the people is acceptable.
To be concrete: if at a given historical moment the basic aspiration of the people goes no further than a demand for salary increases, the leaders can commit one of two errors. They can limit their action to stimulating this one demand54 or they can overrule this popular aspiration and substitute something more far-reaching—but something which has not yet come to the forefront of the people’s attention.
The solution lies in synthesis: the leaders must on the one hand identify with the people’s demand for higher salaries, while on the other they must pose the meaning of that very demand as a problem. By doing this, the leaders pose as a problem a real, concrete, historical situation of which the salary demand is one dimension. It will thereby become clear that salary demands alone cannot comprise a definitive solution. The essence of this solution can be found in the previously cited statement by bishops of the Third World that “if the workers do not somehow come to be owners of their own
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organization serves the ends of liberation.
Only in the encounter of the people with the revolutionary leaders—in their communion, in their praxis—can this theory be built.
