Defending “Things of the Rich” Impoverishes the Spirit and Limits the Soul

Defending “things of the rich” often appears to mean defending freedom, God, family, the market, or democracy. But when we look deeper, we may be defending a State historically built for the few.

Since the Portuguese invasion, in the name of the Cross, original peoples were treated as “savages,” “soulless,” or inferior. The Brazilian State was born extracting: bodies, lands, gold, labor — and now, perhaps, rare earths.

This is the root of the Psychopathology of the Brazilian State: a State that says it represents the people, but still functions as a thing of the rich.

In this live, we will use two key concepts:

Spirit = Utupe
Semantic memory: ideas, narratives, symbols, concepts.

Soul = Pei Utupe
Episodic memory: the spirit embodied in emotion, lived experience, and the body.

When social media, politicians, pastors, media outlets, and algorithms sponsor emotions, they do not capture only opinions. They capture the body. They produce fear, anger, urgency, and false belonging.

The person thinks they are thinking, but they are reacting.
Interoception feels threat.
Proprioception searches for shelter.
And the individual can become mass.

But Jiwasa is not herd behavior.

Jiwasa is shared agency. It is the living “we.” In Jiwasa, the individual is not erased. They keep critical thinking, perception, and autonomy. In healthy complex systems, leadership emerges according to the situation: sometimes one person leads, then another perceives better, then another organizes the path.

This is different from an uncritical human mass.

The herd appears when the body is afraid and seeks belonging at any cost. The person stops asking “is this true?” and starts looking for shelter inside the group.

Then the spirit becomes poorer, because it only repeats narratives.
And the soul becomes limited, because it lives induced emotions.

Defending things of the rich impoverishes the spirit because it reduces our ideas to the interests of a few.
And it limits the soul because it transforms lived experience into fear, anger, and obedience.

A living future begins when the citizen stops being mass and becomes body-territory again: with Jiwasa, critical thinking, real belonging, and the courage to think differently.