When the State uses the law not to elevate man but to redefine him — and what Plato, Aristotle, and the Western tradition have to say about it
May 12, 2026 · By Marcelo Salamon · ~14 min read
Abstract
Conservatism is not nostalgia. It is the conviction that there are truths about human nature, the family, and the social order — truths discovered over millennia — that cannot be abolished by decree. Brazil today bears the consequences of decades spent eroding those truths: laws weaponized to impose what society never chose, taxes that enslave the citizen, a cultural revolution assaulting the foundations of family and Western civilization, and a political class that profits from it all. This essay is an uncompromising defense of the natural order, the family, and the law as an instrument of virtue — and an indictment of the State that betrayed them.
The foundation: why tradition matters
Genuine conservatism is not the defense of the status quo out of laziness or fear of change. It is, as Edmund Burke taught when he watched the French Revolution devour France in the name of utopia, the conviction that institutions which have survived the test of time carry an accumulated wisdom that no single generation has the authority to discard. Family, religion, property, natural law — these are not medieval prejudices. They are the hard-earned conclusions of centuries of human experience about what works, what elevates, and what destroys.
Plato understood this. For him, laws were not arbitrary conventions — they were the crystallization of values a civilization had built and wished to pass on. Aristotle completed the picture: laws create habits, and habits form character. But both began from a premise that modern thought dismisses with breathtaking arrogance: human nature exists. An objective good exists. And the purpose of law, family, and education is to help man realize it — not to deconstruct it.
That is precisely what is being destroyed in Brazil — and across much of the West — with the speed and arrogance of those who mistake rupture for progress.
“A nation that does not know its history does not possess the past — and will soon lose the future.”— Roger Scruton
The cultural revolution and the assault on the family
The family is not an arbitrary social construct that each generation may redesign to its liking. It is the oldest institution in human history — older than the State, older than written law, older than any government that ever existed. It is where a child first learns what love means, what limits mean, what sacrifice and responsibility require. It is where civilization reproduces itself — not merely biologically, but culturally and morally.
The ideology that now dominates Brazil’s institutions — universities, media, the bureaucratic apparatus, and much of the judiciary — begins from a radically different premise: that the traditional family is a structure of oppression to be dismantled, that gender is an arbitrary performance with no grounding in nature, and that children belong to the State before they belong to their parents.
These ideas did not originate in Brazil. They arrived from a European and North American intellectual tradition — from Gramsci to Foucault to Judith Butler — whose declared project was the destruction of traditional Western institutions as the path to total social transformation. What began as academic theory in the universities of the 1970s is government policy in the 2020s. And Brazil, with its fragile educational system and its imitative intellectual elite, absorbed all of it without the critical filter that a robust culture would have provided.
The practical results are visible everywhere: school curricula that address gender identity before teaching children to read and write properly; legislation and judicial rulings that redefine millennial concepts without popular consultation; a State that claims the right to educate children against their own families’ values. And parents — especially those with lower income and less formal education, the most vulnerable — left without the tools to resist.
“When the State claims the moral education of the child, it is not expanding rights — it is confiscating the family.”
Judicial activism: when the court replaces the people
One of the gravest features of Brazil’s crisis is the substitution of democratic deliberation by judicial activism. Questions of the highest moral and cultural significance — which ought to be debated by society and decided by its elected representatives — have been transferred to tribunals that resolve them through expansive constitutional interpretation, without enacted law, without popular mandate, without accountability.
Aristotle knew that law only carries its formative power when it emerges from social consensus. A ruling imposed from above — however technically grounded — does not change convictions. It breeds resentment. It deepens divisions. And, contrary to its stated intent, it does not solve the problem it claims to address: it merely drives it underground, where it ferments under greater pressure.
Conservatism does not reject the protection of minorities. It rejects the method that short-circuits public debate, concentrates power in unelected courts, and turns legitimate moral disagreement into a criminal offense. A healthy democracy resolves its cultural conflicts through persuasion, not through the criminalization of dissent. When moral disagreement becomes judicial persecution, we are no longer in a democracy — we are in a reverse theocracy, where the dogma has changed but the inquisitor remains.
Americans who have watched their own Supreme Court become a political battlefield will recognize this pattern immediately. When nine unelected justices become the final arbiters of what a society must believe, the democratic experiment is in serious trouble — regardless of which side wins on any given day.
The enslaving State: taxes, corruption, and the pact of misery
Brazil’s moral crisis does not exist in a vacuum. It is sustained and amplified by a fiscal and political structure designed — whether by intent or by the logic of power — to keep the people deliberately dependent and deliberately uninformed.
The mechanism is simple and brutal. Excessive taxes concentrate resources in the State. The State redistributes them not as rights but as favors, as calculated dependency. A people that needs the government to survive votes out of gratitude and fear, not out of conviction. And a people denied quality education lacks the tools to question that arrangement. Material poverty and intellectual poverty feed each other — and the Brazilian State profits from both.
Left and right alike participate in this pact. When Congress voted on taxes applied to basic food items — the most fundamental expense in any working family’s budget — lawmakers from across the political spectrum voted together to keep those taxes in place. On the campaign trail, they war over family values and the poor. In the voting booth, they all protect the same pocket. The ideological war is theater. The fiscal pillage is real.
Corruption, in this context, is not an anomaly in the system — it is the system. Accepting money to cast a vote is a crime in any civilized country. In Brazil, it is a common practice with rare consequences. The law has been bent to protect the very people who were supposed to defend it. Think of it this way: imagine if members of Congress were openly paid by lobbyists to vote a certain way, and almost no one went to prison for it. That is not a metaphor for Brazil — it is a description of how things work.
A modest step forward: Brazil’s 2026 income tax reform
It would be dishonest to ignore that something shifted in the tax arena. A new law enacted in late 2025 and in force since January 2026 expanded income tax exemptions in a meaningful way. Brazilians earning up to roughly one thousand dollars a month — a figure that covers a large portion of the working population — now pay no income tax at all. Those earning between that threshold and about fifteen hundred dollars receive a partial, graduated reduction. Those at the top, earning above ten thousand dollars per month, now face a minimum effective tax rate that corrects a longstanding and scandalous distortion: for decades, wealthy business owners receiving corporate dividends paid effective rates below three percent, while salaried workers paid up to twenty-seven and a half. That inversion is now partially addressed.
Additionally, those who invest in cryptocurrencies through Brazilian exchanges benefit from an exemption on monthly sales up to approximately seven thousand dollars. Below that threshold, any profit is tax-free. Above it, gains are taxed at rates between fifteen and twenty-two percent. It is worth noting the rule’s precision: if total monthly sales exceed the limit by even one dollar, the entire month’s profit becomes taxable — there is no partial exemption. For operations on foreign exchanges, no exemption applies at all.
The conservative who deals with reality knows how to distinguish a victory from a capitulation. This reform is neither — it is a minimum step of fiscal justice that should have been taken decades ago. The warning stands: without annual inflation adjustments, these thresholds will be quietly eroded until the working class is once again paying the full tax burden from which it was supposedly relieved. It is the oldest trick in Brazil’s tax history. Only those who know that history avoid falling for it again.
What conservatism proposes — and what it demands
Conservatism is not merely criticism — it is a proposal. And the proposal has a name: reconstruction. Of institutions that have been hollowed out. Of the family as the irreplaceable nucleus of society. Of the school as a place for transmitting knowledge and virtue, not ideological experimentation. Of the law as an instrument of order and justice, not social engineering.
This demands, first, honesty about the diagnosis. Brazil does not have merely a problem of bad laws or corrupt politicians. It has a problem of cultural collapse — one that began when it accepted, without sufficient resistance, the premise that traditional institutions were enemies to be dismantled rather than a patrimony to be preserved and improved.
It demands, second, courage. The courage to defend publicly what one believes, knowing that the dominant intellectual climate punishes dissent. The courage to say that the family formed by a father, a mother, and children is not simply one among many equivalent options — it is the structure that nature and history have proven most robust for human formation. The courage to say that freedom without virtue is not freedom at all — it is license that destroys itself and everyone around it.
It demands, third, patience. Civilizations are not built in a single election cycle. If it took decades to arrive where we are, it will take decades to rebuild. The conservatism that Plato and Aristotle taught — that the good requires constant cultivation, that character forms over time, that no generation may dispense with what previous ones learned — is a school of militant patience. There are no shortcuts. There are only the daily choices of families, teachers, pastors, and citizens who refuse to surrender what they were given.
Conclusion: does Brazil have a way out?
Yes. But it will not come from where many expect.
It will not come from a single leader who fixes everything. Political messianism — of any color — is itself a symptom of the moral crisis: the inability of a people to govern themselves from their own convictions and institutions, waiting always for someone to come and save what should be the responsibility of each citizen.
It will not come from a law that corrects by decree what has been destroyed across generations. The law, as Aristotle taught, is the weakest instrument of human formation. It can prohibit crime — it cannot produce virtue.
It will come — if it comes at all — from where it has always come: from the family that insists on transmitting values when the State insists on subverting them. From the school that still has teachers who teach thinking rather than compliance. From the religious community that keeps alive the conviction that man has a dignity no government granted and no government may revoke. From the citizen who refuses to trade his freedom for the crumbs of the welfare State.
The beauty of law exists. The strength of the family exists. The wisdom of tradition exists. What Brazil needs is not a new idea — it needs the courage to defend the old ones, the ones tested by time and proven by experience. It needs, in a single word, character. And character is not decreed. It is built — one child, one family, one school, one generation at a time.