The Left and “Winning Hearts and Minds”
The Left and “Winning Hearts and Minds”
Subtitle: Psychopathology of the Brazilian State
1. Opening — Fractal, 17 years old
You turn on the TV or enter social media.
Someone says:
“we need to win hearts and minds.”
It sounds beautiful.
It sounds caring.
It sounds intelligent.
It sounds like sensitive politics.
But pause for a second.
If someone wants to win your mind…
is it still yours?
If someone wants to win your heart…
what remains of your consciousness?
Maybe the problem is not the speech.
Maybe it is the hidden goal inside it.
2. Deepening
The terms “right” and “left” seem natural today.
But they come from a historical seating arrangement during the French Revolution: groups defending different political positions sat on opposite sides of the assembly. The right was associated with preserving privileges; the left with change.
Over time, this became a global way of organizing politics.
But this division also carries a problem:
it simplifies reality too much.
It turns complexity into team loyalty.
It turns debate into identity.
It turns politics into symbolic war.
Here enters the central point.
The idea of “winning hearts and minds,” often used by sectors of the left — including strategies historically associated with the Workers’ Party in Brazil — may appear, at first, as dialogue.
But in practice, it can become something else:
a dispute over perception.
It is no longer about building consciousness.
It becomes about directing feeling.
It is no longer about expanding thought.
It becomes about organizing narratives.
When politics enters emotion without metacognition, it can:
reduce critical thinking,
create automatic identification,
generate belonging without reflection,
transform ideas into rigid beliefs.
In other words:
it replaces consciousness with adhesion.
This is not exclusive to the left.
But here the criticism is direct:
when a political project organizes itself to “win” the other, it stops treating the other as a subject.
It treats the other as a target.
And this is where the psychopathology appears.
The discourse may speak of justice, equality, and inclusion…
but the method may operate as capture.
This becomes visible when:
debate becomes slogan,
divergence becomes attack,
questioning becomes betrayal,
thinking becomes automatic positioning.
And then something essential is lost:
the autonomy of the body that thinks.
In our model, this is central.
Because consciousness is not something imposed from outside.
It emerges from the relation between body, perception, and world — through shared agency, Jiwasa.
When this relation is replaced by ready-made narrative,
the mind stops exploring.
It starts repeating.
3. Metacognition
Now bring this inward.
When you hear a political discourse that pleases you, what happens?
Do you think more?
Or agree quickly?
Do you question?
Or feel that you “already understood everything”?
This is the point.
Capture does not happen only when someone disagrees with you.
It also happens when you agree without noticing.
Now ask:
Are my ideas mine?
Or were they organized for me?
Do I feel that I am understanding the world?
Or only positioning myself inside it?
That difference is everything.
Without metacognition, any political side can capture.
With metacognition, no side dominates.
Politics stops being a dispute over narrative.
It becomes the construction of reality.
And that changes the entire game.
References in Didactic Order
Books
Antonio Gramsci — Prison Notebooks
Develops the idea of cultural hegemonies, showing how power is also built through influence over thought and culture.Paulo Freire — Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Proposes education as conscientization, not imposition — an important counterpoint to the idea of “winning minds.”George Orwell — 1984
Shows how language and narrative can control perception and thought.Gustave Le Bon — The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
Explores how individuals change behavior inside collective dynamics.Daniel Kahneman — Thinking, Fast and Slow
Helps explain how fast, emotional decisions can reduce critical reflection.Antonio Damasio — Descartes’ Error
Shows that emotion and reason are integrated, meaning that emotional manipulation directly affects consciousness.
Post-2021 Publications and Studies
Pew Research Center — political polarization studies, 2022–2025
Shows how political identities become more rigid and polarized.Nature Human Behaviour — political behavior studies, 2023–2025
Indicates that emotion and identity often shape political decisions more strongly than rational arguments.OECD — trust and governance reports, 2022–2024
Shows how institutional trust declines when polarization increases.World Economic Forum — Global Risks Report, 2023
Identifies misinformation and social polarization as major global risks.American Psychological Association — studies on political identity, 2022–2024
Shows how ideological belonging affects cognition and perception.MIT — studies on social media and influence, 2023–2025
Indicates that narratives often spread through emotional force more than evidence.
