REAL JIWASA -  A NEW DEMOCRATIC ORDER

What if we did not begin with the institutions we inherited?

A researcher closes a spreadsheet because the funding application ends that night. A physician shortens the time available for listening in order to meet performance targets. A woman cares for a child and an older person without that work appearing as economic production. A river loses volume without participating in the decision that authorized its exploitation.

Each part seems to be performing its function.

Yet the whole system may still be moving toward collapse.

The final question of this series is a constituent one:

What kind of democracy would we create if we did not have to begin with the institutions we inherited?

In the BrainLatam hypothesis, the answer begins with the Body-Territory as the minimum unit of the State.

Before the market, taxation, or political parties, there is a living person, situated in a place and dependent on water, care, language, attention, community, and Biome.

Democracy was not born only once

The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow, gathered evidence that societies existing before European colonization experimented with assemblies, confederations, territorial autonomy, and limits on rulers.

This does not mean that all of them were egalitarian.

It means that centralization, concentrated property, and permanent obedience were never humanity’s only possible destination.

Wengrow also revisited the hypothesis that Indigenous critiques of property, poverty, and submission circulated in Europe and contributed to the intellectual environment in which the Enlightenment emerged. The scale of that influence remains debated, but Indigenous thought must be recognized as philosophy and political theory, not merely as material observed by Europeans.

Perhaps modern democracy was not simply carried from Europe to the Americas.

Perhaps Europe also learned from the peoples it encountered here.

Bubbles, belonging, and monetization

In In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonders of Complex Systems, Giorgio Parisi shows how collective patterns may emerge from local interactions without DNA, a central plan, or a command capable of predicting the system’s final form. Components following relatively simple rules can generate complex collective behavior.

Physics does not determine how society should be organized.

But it offers an important analogy.

On social networks, bubbles may emerge from the interaction between human preferences, previous social bonds, inequalities, commercial incentives, and recommendation systems.

Recent models suggest that algorithms can reinforce homogeneous exposure, but social networks and people’s previous choices are also decisive. Polarization is not produced by code alone. It emerges from the interaction between digital architecture and conflicts that already exist.

Studies involving Brazil also show that crossing informational bubbles does not automatically produce dialogue. Content reaching different groups may generate encounters shaped by hostility and incivility.

The person experiences belonging.

The platform measures retention.

The advertiser finds a profile.

The power group finds mobilization.

The bubble provides shelter—and monetizes that shelter.

Jiwasa is not unanimity

In the respectful adaptation proposed by BrainLatam, Jiwasa describes a “we” that does not erase those who participate in it.

It is not compulsory consensus.

It is not a single voice.

A society in which everyone is required to agree has not built community. It has built obedience.

Jiwasa Democracy asks:

Can we create a shared world without requiring everyone to think, feel, or exist in the same way?

Its norms would arise from the needs of Body-Territories and from the conditions the Biome requires in order to continue sustaining life.

Only after establishing this foundation would we incorporate the mechanisms that work well in federal republics: fundamental rights, due process, territorial autonomy, public services, political alternation, oversight, and limits on power.

First, we define what must remain alive.

Then we design the institutions.

What the economy leaves outside

Before any worker enters the market, someone has prepared food, cared for a child, accompanied an older person, or supported someone in distress.

In Latin American countries that measure this contribution, unpaid domestic and care work represents, on average, approximately 21.3% of GDP. Women perform about 74.5% of this value.

Despite sustaining families, businesses, and institutions, this work remains largely outside compensation and decision-making power.

The same happens with the Biome.

A forest that maintains water, soil, and biodiversity appears as wealth that has not yet been realized.

Its destruction, however, enters economic accounts as production.

A Jiwasa Democracy would recognize care, water, biodiversity, language, science, and data as collective infrastructures.

Citizen Drex would provide universal material security.

Biome Income would return resources to territories that preserve ecological continuity.

The data dividend would recognize that social intelligence also creates wealth.

The danger of the local optimum

Complex systems can improve one part while worsening the whole.

Every field of knowledge has its own local optimum: a metric, a jargon, and a problem considered central within its boundaries.

A researcher may advance their discipline while unintentionally helping maintain a system incapable of protecting life.

In the Exact and Earth Sciences, precision may become abstraction without territory.

In Engineering, efficiency may ignore who will bear the human and environmental costs.

In the Biological Sciences, individual components may eclipse ecological relationships.

In the Health Sciences, treatments may receive more attention and funding than prevention, care, and socio-environmental causes.

In the Agricultural Sciences, productivity may hide water loss, contamination, land concentration, and biodiversity destruction.

In the Applied Social Sciences, growth, credit, and legal certainty may protect contracts without protecting communities.

In the Human Sciences, sophisticated criticism may never reach the people living through the problem.

In Linguistics, Literature, and the Arts, academic recognition may separate expression, memory, and imagination from the territories that produced them.

These eight major areas help organize Brazilian knowledge. They cannot be allowed to transform administrative boundaries into boundaries of reality.

Who chooses the questions of science?

Science is not guided only through censorship.

It is also guided by what receives funding, prestige, laboratories, scholarships, and the possibility of publication.

Mercedes García Carrillo, Federico Testoni, Cecilia Rikap, Matías Blaustein, and their collaborators analyzed more than 16,000 papers linked to Argentina’s CONICET. They found correspondence between its biomedical agenda and international priorities centered on molecular biology, cancer, and pharmaceutical interventions, while socio-environmental factors remained marginal.

The study does not show that all funded research is captured.

It shows that external agendas and peripheral economic positions can influence what becomes researchable.

Thaiane Oliveira and Marcus Vinicius Bomfim also showed that research agendas concerning the Global South often arrive accompanied by the priorities of funders from the Global North, reducing Latin American participation in defining the questions.

The problem is not receiving resources.

The problem is failing to ask:

Who chose the agenda?

Who wrote the language of the funding call?

Who will interpret the results?

Who will turn the discovery into property?

Where will the benefits remain?

The anxiety to monetize may lead the State to fund more easily what promises patents, products, markets, or rapid financial returns, while care, prevention, memory, territorial autonomy, and Biome continuity appear insufficiently “innovative.”

“Repairing” the State for whom?

The State says that public accounts need to be repaired.

In the name of this adjustment, science, health, and education may be presented as flexible expenses that can be reduced.

But the same discipline does not reach every structure with equal intensity.

In June 2026, Brazil’s benchmark interest rate remained at 14.25% per year, preserving high costs for credit and public debt.

At the same time, the Supreme Federal Court and the Office of the Comptroller General continued demanding transparency and traceability for parliamentary amendments. The structure known as the “secret budget” was declared unconstitutional, but control over the authorship, distribution, and execution of these resources remains under construction.

In July 2026, leaders from 21 political parties were summoned to explain how they allocated parliamentary amendments.

Assets and financial flows can also disappear behind corporate chains, investment funds, and legal entities.

The electronic declaration of ultimate beneficial owners, introduced in 2026, seeks to identify the natural persons who ultimately control these structures and to strengthen measures against money laundering, corruption, and tax evasion.

Repairing the State should not mean removing what sustains life while zones of power remain opaque.

It should mean revealing who receives, who decides, who influences, and who bears the cost of each reduction.

Neuro Challenge Latam: every field is called

The Neuro Challenge Latam does not belong exclusively to neuroscience.

It should call researchers from every area of knowledge to form a Jiwasa science.

Every scientific conference could begin by asking:

Who participated in choosing this question?
Which Body-Territory will be affected?
Which Biome will sustain the solution?
Who funds this study?
Where will its benefits remain?

The Exact Sciences can make flows of money, energy, and data visible.

Engineering can design with communities rather than merely for them.

The Biological Sciences can investigate relationships, not only isolated components.

Health research can connect disease with environment, income, work, and care.

Agricultural Sciences can measure water and soil continuity alongside productivity.

Applied Social Sciences can expose concentration, ultimate beneficiaries, and contractual power.

The Human Sciences can reconstruct memory, conflict, and meaning.

Linguistics, Literature, and the Arts can create languages capable of returning science to the shared world.

EEG and NIRS may investigate attention, cooperation, and cognitive load when these methods are appropriate.

But no brain signal will prove the existence of Jiwasa.

The primary measure will be different:

Did science help different people construct a shared decision without erasing disagreement?

A “we” capable of remaining alive

Real Jiwasa is neither a romantic return to the past nor a technology that will save us.

It is a constituent hypothesis.

The Body-Territory becomes the minimum unit of the State.

The Biome participates in the creation of norms.

Attention stops being freely available for extraction.

Science and collective income return to communities.

Power cannot remain permanently concentrated.

Future generations enter decisions before they are born.

Perhaps a new democracy begins when we can say:

There is no repair when we cut what sustains life.
There is no common science when only a few choose the questions.
There is no progress when the Biome pays the bill.
And there is no “we” when someone must disappear for it to be formed.

Jiwasa will not be ready before our participation.

It will emerge when science, State, and community learn to ask together who and what must remain alive so that we can still say:

we.

Essential references

Wengrow, David. For an Anthropology and Archaeology of Freedom. Journal of the British Academy, 2022.

Espinosa Arango, Mónica L. Democracy Against the Grain: Indigenous Politics in Colombia’s Southwest Andes. Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 2022.

Parisi, Giorgio. In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonders of Complex Systems. 2022.

García Carrillo, Mercedes et al. Academic Dependency: The Influence of the Prevailing International Biomedical Research Agenda on Argentina’s CONICET. Heliyon, 2022.

Oliveira, Thaiane Moreira de; Bomfim, Marcus Vinicius de Jesus. Funding of Research Agendas About the Global South in Latin America and the Caribbean. Tapuya, 2023.

Kobellarz, Jordan K. et al. Bubble Reachers and Uncivil Discourse in the Polarized Online Public Sphere. PLOS ONE, 2024.

ECLAC. The Care Society for a Better World. 2023.

ECLAC. Financing Care Systems and Policies in Latin America and the Caribbean. 2024.

Central Bank of Brazil. Historical Record of Benchmark Interest Rates. 2026.

Office of the Comptroller General of Brazil. Transparency and Traceability of Parliamentary Amendments. 2025–2026.

Brazilian Federal Revenue Service. Digital Ultimate Beneficial Owner Declaration. 2026.