Causal Intelligence of the State - Stop Managing Effects

When the State arrives late—and arrives armed

Let us imagine a Brazilian child.

During pregnancy, the child’s mother faced food insecurity, precarious work, and difficulty accessing prenatal care. The child was born in a territory marked by inadequate housing, unstable schooling, few green spaces, and everyday violence.

The State appeared occasionally, but only in fragments: a medical appointment, a food basket, a school enrollment, a police stop.

Years later, after an offense was committed, the State finally arrived with all its strength.

It arrived with a police vehicle, a criminal proceeding, and imprisonment.

For many poor and Black Bodies-Territories, the most organized face of public power appears only after hunger, school dropout, psychological suffering, and violence have already produced their effects. Brazil’s prison system remains deeply racialized; recent National Council of Justice documents indicate that approximately 70% of the incarcerated population is Black.

A causally intelligent State must arrive before the prison cell: during pregnancy, through nutrition, education, housing, care, and the possibility of a future.

The capture of attention protects the causes

While the population struggles to survive, an industry competes for its attention.

Steve Bannon popularized the strategy of “flooding the zone”: releasing so many claims, scandals, distortions, and contradictory narratives that society loses its ability to distinguish what is essential from what is merely noise.

This mechanism is not only about persuading people to believe one lie. It produces disorientation, exhaustion, and distrust in every shared source of information.

The population spends the day debating an edited sentence, a manipulated audio clip, an artificial controversy, or a manufactured enemy.

Meanwhile, structural questions disappear:

Who receives the interest paid by the State?
Who controls the public budget?
Who profits from online betting?
Who finances influencers?
Who owns the platforms?
Who converts fear into votes?

Disinformation can prevent people from identifying the actual causes of their suffering.

Attention capture manages public outrage so that it never reaches the structures that monetize inequality.

More than one trillion reais in interest is also a fiscal issue

In the twelve months ending in May 2026, nominal interest expenses for Brazil’s consolidated public sector reached approximately R$1.11 trillion, equivalent to around 8.5% of GDP.

This figure does not represent a single direct transfer to a small group of individuals. Government debt is held through financial institutions, investment funds, pension entities, insurers, foreign investors, government bodies, and other structures.

Yet behind these institutions are ultimate beneficiaries—individuals and corporations whose identities and levels of concentration are not always visible in aggregated public data.

It would therefore be scientifically inaccurate to claim, without full wealth tracing, that the entire amount goes directly to the richest 0.01%.

But it would be equally naïve to ignore Brazil’s extreme concentration of income, wealth, and financial assets.

Causal Intelligence of the State would ask:

Who are the final CPF beneficiaries hidden behind the thousands of CNPJs, funds, holdings, and financial structures that receive public interest income?

Fiscal responsibility cannot mean restricting education, healthcare, social protection, and public investment while the distributional effects of interest payments remain outside popular understanding.

Interest is also public expenditure.

The question is why one form of expenditure is presented as an unavoidable technical obligation while another is described as irresponsible generosity.

A hidden budget and a highly visible betting industry

The mechanism known as Brazil’s “secret budget” was criticized for concealing the political authorship of public spending, reducing traceability, and allowing billions of reais to be distributed through opaque negotiations.

Even after judicial decisions declared parts of the system unconstitutional, transparency problems related to parliamentary amendments continued.

This is not corruption in the simple sense of a hidden suitcase of money.

It is something more structurally dangerous: the possibility of using legal procedures to distribute public resources without making political responsibility fully visible.

The betting industry offers another window.

Online gambling platforms entered Brazilian homes through sports, influencers, football clubs, advertising, and promises of easy money. Families already affected by debt and insecurity were transformed into a market for permanent risk.

A Senate inquiry into betting ended in 2025 without approving its final report. This alone does not prove that parliamentarians were bought by the industry. It does, however, reveal the difficulty of regulating an economically powerful market even when there is growing evidence of indebtedness, compulsive behavior, and social harm.

The same delay appears in the regulation of digital platforms.

While Congress postpones comprehensive rules, social media companies continue to organize attention, advertising, political communication, and access to public debate through systems that citizens cannot inspect.

These processes form a causal loop:

money buys reach and influence;
reach captures attention;
attention produces votes and permissions;
permissions protect profits;
profits purchase even more reach.

Short-term profit is not merely an economic outcome.

It becomes an organizing cause of inequality when it can buy legislation, silence, visibility, delay, and access to the State.

The State must accompany the entire Body-Territory

The World Health Organization emphasizes that the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age—as well as their access to money, power, and resources—deeply influence health and life expectancy.

This requires a State that accompanies the person from pregnancy to death.

Not to control consciousness, but to guarantee:

nutrition, healthcare, housing, education, economic security, environmental protection, culture, public participation, and the freedom to disagree.

For many poor and Black citizens, however, the State does not arrive as continuity.

It arrives as interruption.

It is absent during gestation, unstable during childhood, bureaucratic during illness, and fully present during punishment.

A State that disappears while causes are being produced and reappears only to imprison their effects is not neutral. It is participating in the causal chain.

Education changes trajectories

Education is not an automatic vaccine against crime. Schooling does not eliminate racism, economic exclusion, or the selective practices of the criminal justice system.

Nevertheless, education is an important protective factor.

Research following a Brazilian birth cohort found that young people who completed school at the expected age were less likely to report violent and nonviolent offenses at age 22. Repeated school failure was associated with higher risk.

This does not prove that school performance is the sole cause of criminal behavior.

It shows that educational trajectories participate in the pathways that move a Body-Citizen closer to or farther away from the prison system.

A well-educated person may still commit crimes.

But a Body-Citizen who has food, protection, learning, belonging, and real prospects has fewer reasons to enter pathways organized by desperation, illegal markets, or violence.

It is less expensive—humanly, socially, and economically—to support life before imprisonment than to punish abandonment afterward.

The causal question is not:

“Why did this individual fail?”

It is:

“Which conditions repeatedly increase the probability that thousands of people from the same territories will reach the same outcome?”

Citizen Drex: distributing the State’s return

The official Drex project currently developed by the Central Bank of Brazil does not perform this function. It remains a digital infrastructure project for tokenized assets and programmable transactions, mediated by authorized financial institutions.

Citizen Drex is a different BrainLatam hypothesis.

It proposes that part of public digital money could originate directly in each citizen’s CPF as a State Dividend or Right to Economic Existence, instead of reaching the population only through debt, conditional benefits, private credit, or the ownership of financial assets.

This would not be charity.

It would recognize that each Body-Territory participates in the existence of the State, the economy, the biomes, and collective wealth.

The idea still requires rigorous economic design.

Economists and financial experts would need to determine:

how much money could be issued without generating inflation;
how issuance would relate to productive capacity;
how privacy would be protected;
how political surveillance would be prevented;
how the system would coexist with bank credit;
how fraud and concentration would be avoided.

But the causal inversion is powerful:

Today, the State strongly remunerates those who already possess financial assets. Citizen Drex asks whether the State can also remunerate existence, education, care, and territorial belonging.

The purpose is not to take income away from every saver or pension fund.

It is to question a system in which access to State-generated financial returns depends primarily on already owning capital.

From the State of punishment to the State of development

A causally intelligent State would not wait for a young person to become a police statistic before offering its full institutional capacity.

It would build a longitudinal public commitment:

during gestation, nutrition and prenatal care;
during childhood, protection, play, health, and high-quality education;
during adolescence, belonging, culture, income prospects, and participation;
during adulthood, work, care, housing, and economic autonomy;
during old age, dignity, memory, health, and community.

The same State that can identify a person for taxation, debt collection, policing, and imprisonment must also be capable of recognizing them as a continuous Body-Citizen.

Citizen Drex could become one element of this continuity: a daily material relationship between citizenship and the State.

But digital currency alone will not create belonging.

It must be connected to education, healthcare, food, housing, ecological regeneration, and democratic participation.

Money must accompany the material capacity to sustain life.

Otherwise, it will only digitize abandonment.

A causal public budget

Archaeological research in Mesoamerica shows that complex societies organized authority and resources through different combinations of elites, councils, collective action, taxation, and public infrastructure.

There was no single pre-Columbian political model, nor a past without hierarchy and conflict.

However, archaeology demonstrates that social outcomes do not arise solely from individual character. They are shaped by institutions that concentrate or distribute resources, authority, and participation.

Ailton Krenak reminds us that the future cannot remain a promise offered while the present is destroyed.

Causal Intelligence of the State must therefore ask before approving every public budget:

How much will we spend managing the effect?

How much would it cost to interrupt the cause?

Who profits if the problem continues?

Who receives the State’s financial return?

Where will public power arrive first—in pregnancy or in prison?

We may now formulate the central thesis:

A State that distributes interest at the top, opacity through the budget, betting advertisements through every screen, and disinformation through digital platforms—but delivers police and prison to poor territories—is not merely responding to inequality. It is helping produce it.

Causal responsibility begins when the State accompanies every Body-Citizen from gestation onward, guarantees material conditions for development, and allows public wealth to return directly to the population.

How many prisons, illnesses, and acts of violence would never exist if the State invested in the Body-Territory before it became a criminal statistic?

Commented references

Central Bank of Brazil (2026). Fiscal Statistics.
Records more than R$1.1 trillion in nominal public-sector interest expenses over the twelve months ending in May 2026.

World Health Organization (2025). World Report on Social Determinants of Health Equity.
Shows that health and longevity depend on living conditions and on the unequal distribution of money, power, and resources.

Martins, R. C. et al. (2022). School Performance and Young Adult Crime in a Brazilian Birth Cohort.
Finds that completing school at the expected age is associated with lower involvement in violent and nonviolent offenses, while repeated failure marks higher risk.

Hernández, L.; Chávez, A.; Rodríguez-Puello, G. (2024). Does Education Reduce Criminal Activities?
Reports an association between higher educational capital and lower criminal activity in Chilean municipalities.

Brazilian Federal Supreme Court—decisions concerning the “secret budget” and parliamentary amendments.
Documents constitutional and transparency problems involving concealed authorship, traceability, and the distribution of public resources.

BrainLatam (2026). Citizen Drex: Money as the Metabolism of Territory.
Presents the State Dividend as a hypothesis of public digital money originating in the citizen rather than as individual debt.