To learn about a people's culture is to take a journey into ourselves, into our collective unconscious. Our original ground and source. This is the only way for Brazil to finally develop a unique civilization, capable of contributing to humanity, whether in the artistic, scientific, economic or ethical fields.

Tiago Barreira

Acquiring culture, cultivating oneself, knowing oneself, self-improvement, or another very fashionable term today, self-care: they are all related terms and describe the same process. We're not talking here about self-care as that muscular narcissistic exhibitionism that many seek today in the name of self-satisfaction and self-esteem. We're not talking about that self-overcoming that athletes pursue in search of vain external glory. Nor are we talking about a trip and journey like the mass tourism that young university students do in order to collect Instagram likes.

The importance of culture for self-knowledge

We are talking about what is the most essential objective of the search for culture, which is this journey towards Being. Or in the words of the Galician writer Vicente Risco: from this puntiño central part of Being, around which we take refuge in the midst of all the storms, instabilities and fleeting changes of life and the world.

It is in this sense that we answer the question: what is culture? Why should we acquire it? It is in this sense that we must seek it out. This journey towards our inner self, towards our most authentic Being. The greatest struggle and battle that anyone can undertake in this life is to conquer this inner voice. Everything else that seeks to silence this inner voice, be it social or ideological alienation or the automatisms of everyday life, must be fought against.

The ancient Greeks also understood culture in this way, and they had a name for this acquisition of culture: Paideia. And it was linked to the achievement of human excellence and perfection, to what is most full and beautiful within us. Know thyself, according to Socrates, was the sure way to achieve our spiritual happiness.

I'll finish by defining the idea of culture in its sense of high culture, according to the classical and ancient philosophers. As a pedagogy of spiritual self-cultivation towards Being.

The connection between high culture and popular culture

So we need to define culture in another dimension. Knowing oneself: a journey, a journey into our Being. This Being, the source of this inner voice, is a universe and a world. It is a microcosm and mirror of the outside world, the universe of culture and human society, or as Leibniz put it, a monad.

There is no other way to encounter the Being present in our inner unconscious soul than through contact with the external world of popular culture, expressed through its literature, narratives, legends and myths.

That's where I finally want to get to the central theme of this article. Getting to know the outer social cultural world, as a complement to the inner soul, is the only sure way on the journey to this unconscious monad.

It is precisely here that I see the crucial importance of popular culture. It is not an inferior culture, alien to the pedagogical formation of the Paideia, but an integral part of it. This is precisely what happened in Western Europe in the 19th century: the discovery of popular culture by Romanticism.

The search for authenticity was the great goal of the Romantics, who found in popular culture genuine expressions of this authenticity and the starting point for inspiring authentic feelings in a society and for the development of a vitalized civilization.

The idea of the creative artistic genius comes from romanticism. The artistic genius occupies a central and revitalizing position in a society, as interpreters of that society, something akin to prophets. For Romantic thinkers such as Herder, poetic intuition is exalted as being able to give voice to the unconscious imagination of a people and a nation, in the form of unique and authentic literature and art.

Popular art, literature, language, mythical narratives, according to the Romantics, is the expression of this great collective creative genius that is the people.

The romantic cultural project of rescuing popular traditions thus has great pedagogical and cultural value. In this sense, there is no dichotomy between high culture and popular culture. Popular culture is an indispensable component in the pedagogical formation of high culture. Paideia for the ancient Greeks, Bildung according to Goethe, or the human flourishing according to Anglo-Saxon philosophers. Whatever it is called, human self-cultivation requires, like any starting point, a soil, a ground. This ground is the ground of myth, of symbols and archetypes rooted in the imagination of a people.

Okay, we've finished defining popular culture and its role according to the Romantic project. As a fruitful expression of the deep and vast collective unconscious present in a local culture.

High culture, in a world with an economic and utilitarian mentality, has become confused with luxury consumer goods, as a product aimed exclusively at the economic elite. Something totally false.

We find high expressions of originality in Brazilian artistic movements with a popular theme. Much of the prejudice against high culture in Brazil comes from this tendency to see it as the snobbery of wealthy economic classes.

On the other hand, there is a certain prejudice on the part of many disseminators of high culture in Brazil to dismiss any national popular cultural manifestation as an expression of decadence, and to turn their backs on everything that rural and non-European traditions, such as African and indigenous traditions, have left in terms of music, poetry and art in Brazil.

Seeking a balance in this sense is fundamental. Neither true high culture follows the stereotype of the classicist academic in a suit with a pipe, who is guilty of superficial inauthenticity, nor does Geunine popular culture follow the stereotype of the funkeiro, the pagodeiro and the sertanejo singer, who produces content for the masses, and who is also guilty of being inauthentic.

The importance of popular culture in collective and individual formation

It is in this sense that we must understand the role of popular culture. The rescue of this world of symbols, narratives, heroes and tragedies, found in the imagery of its art and literature, is crucial for the regeneration of a tradition and culture. It is a contact with the ground that nourishes us, the roots and sources of inspiration. In terms of Jungian psychoanalysis, contact with this great perennial collective unconscious is a means of overcoming our traumas, fears and collective anxieties. This whole range of unconscious complexes is often manifested in our history through false leaders, false illusions and promises.

The Brazilian people need this great therapeutic encounter with themselves, in order to overcome their crises, learn from their tragedies and failures, and exorcise their complexes. Undertaking this spiritual journey, this Paideia, this rediscovery of their own culture and the ground of their collective unconscious, can be understood not only in its individual dimension of psychoanalysts, to be done for the purposes of personal growth, but also collectively, for the purposes of civilizational growth

This is the only way for Brazil to finally develop a unique civilization, capable of making contributions to humanity, whether in the artistic, scientific, economic or ethical fields. In traditional popular literature and art we find countless symbols and myths that shape our Brazilian character and way of being and living. Brazilian popular culture, based on Galician-Portuguese, African and indigenous cultures, even though many people today try to turn their backs on it in search of models that are alien to their upbringing, can be seen, in the words of Joaquim Nabuco, as this "wet nurse" that nourishes us from an early age and is therefore substantially linked to us. Songs, lyrics, tales, rural folklore, legends, our Portuguese language. All of this forms and shapes our unconscious universe that we carry into adulthood, directing our destiny.