Recent successes of Brazilian athletes and artists have contributed to rejoicing national pride. However, the idea of the country of inferiority against developed nations persists in popular imagination. “This country does not go on because people don’t like to work, it is a lazy people.” The speech comes from the entrepreneur Odete Roitman, a character who lived by the actress Debora Bloch in the remake of the soap opera Vale Tudo of TV Globo. The actress has already said that the villain embodies the Mutt complex by underestimating everything that is national. For the author of the new version of the plot, Manuela Dias, to speak badly of the country “is saturated”.
In 1958, the writer Nelson Rodrigues was the one who called this trace of inferiority contained in Brazilian culture. In the chronicle in the shade of the immortal boots published in the Manchete magazine, the author states that the Brazilian “is a turndown Narcissus, which spits in his own image”. But he claimed that this “lack of confidence in himself” was overcome when the men’s football team won the first world cup title against Sweden after winning other European teams.
However, the experts listened to DW say that this pessimism of Brazil is still present in the imagination of the country, which oscillates between periods of greater or lesser emphasis. While the criticisms embodied by Odete Roitman in 1988 and 2025 still echo in public, on the other, the projection of Brazilian athletes and artists in international competitions and prizes contributes to rekindling national pride.
This was the case of the gymnast Rebeca Andrade, who won the gold medal at the Paris Olympics and, in May of this year, of Hugo Calderano, who took silver at the table tennis World Cup. In the cinema, they are still here, by Walter Salles, won the Oscar for the best foreign film and the secret agent, by Kleber Mendonça Filho, the golden palm for the best actor and the direction at the Cannes Film Festival.
Inferiority economy
The researcher of the Federal University of the ABC (UFABC) Gilberto Maringoni underlines that although culture and sport are a breath, they are insufficient to justify these moments of greater euphoria. Remember that, in the context of the 1958 World Cup, the country was crossing a period of economic ascension, with the construction of Brazilia and the impulse to industrialization.
However, since the 1980s, the country has undergone hyperinflation and unemployment times and industry has less and less participation in the gross domestic product (GDP). “The economy is experiencing a constant chicken flight, the bumps and cannot take off. When we have to import technologies, behind it, there is the idea that we are not able to produce it, which strengthens the perspective that everything that is foreign is better. Or when the country focuses on the export of goods, it is as if it could not produce sophisticated goods, but Brazile has the ability to invest.”
A survey published by Atlasintel Consultany in April showed that in the perception of 44% of the Brazilians, the scenario in the labor market is negative. Another 37% said that the family’s economic situation is unfavorable. In addition, they indicated how the greatest problems in the country and drug trafficking, corruption and inflation. Therefore, the economist Eduardo Giannetti states that in 2025 Brazil is in the middle of the spectrum between feelings of inferiority and self -esteem.
“Brazil lived a moment of almost euphoria at the end of the second term of the Lula administration, when there has been a very promising path of economic growth with the increase in the middle class. Now it is unlikely that the country has a strong condition of trust when the economy is not going well,” he said.
For Giannetti, this pessimism has to do with the vision of an economic and academic elite on the country. “According to this vision, we are a bad copy of modern civilization in Europe and the United States, which ignores Brazil as a cultural option in a life -oriented lifestyle oriented than for consumption, technology, efficiency.”
Colonial root
For researchers, this Brazilian inferiority speech is linked to the formation of the country by colonization and transformation between Europeans, indigenous people and African peoples who have been slaveized. “To force a slave to work, it was not enough to have the whip and the chain, it was necessary to convince him that he was lower and did not foresee anything. With this, the Mutt complex is inoculated to the people, neither from the colonizer nor from the dominant classes,” explains Maringoni.
According to the researcher, after the abolition of slavery in 1888, the immigration of European workers in Brazil “increased the perception of the Mutt from the idea of cliché”. Remember that the intellectuals of the time, such as Nina Rodrigues and Silvio Romero, have reached the notions of scientific racism to justify that Brazil would be a lower country due to ethnic mix.
Eduardo Giannetti says that this perspective has contributed to cultural identification with pessimism. “But it seems very misleading to call this sensation of complex inferiority,” he says. “Why elect the Mutt like the one we have the worst? The viral is invisible. There is implicitly in this metaphor an attic that the pure is superior to mixed. I consider it very serious, it indicates racial discrimination. The real Mutt complex is the idea that there is something wrong with turning lacta.”
Overcoming viralarism
As in the colonial past, today the idea of inferiority of the Brazilian people persists. For the philosopher Marcia Tiburi, which brings the Mutt complex are not the target populations of this narrative, but the dominant social classes. “This humiliation is a political technology used by the owners of power, who is both owners of violence, in a colonized, patriarchal and racist country like ours, to explore the poorest, women and blacks.”
It underlines that, over time, the repetition of these ideas by intellectuals and members of a social and academic elite made it true. “For example, this idea has been created that the Brazilians do not work. Anyone who lived in Europe knows how much the Brazilians work a lot. These are speeches that work for repetition and that create this truth that dominates subjectivity as a whole.”
However, Tiburi observes that the target groups of those who reproduce the speech of the Mutt complex have started organizing themselves in social movements, such as black and feminist to dissociate themselves from a negative stereotype. “The populations that have been humiliated have overcome humiliation through social movements, in which people create consciousness. We see today a proud darkness of themselves in Brazil.”
To supplant the feeling that the country has not worked, the experts consider that it takes more than a change in the mentality, it is necessary to provide better living conditions for the population, as regards teaching, transport, safety and toilet -health services. Official data underline difficulties such as functional illiteracy of 29%, the lack of access to the system of sewage in 37.5% of the houses, in addition to the persistence of food failure in 27.6% of the houses.
“We have a series of practical challenges that the country has not faced the necessary firmness for a long time,” says Giannetti. “I think it is important how important the agenda more than the foot is the symbolic agenda. Oswaldo de Andrade, asks the question: tui or not tui? Here is the answer is tui and not tui. We absorb the essential elements of modern western culture, in medicine, in technology, but without losing what distinguishes us as a gifted culture.”
Source: Terra
Rose James is a Gossipify movie and series reviewer known for her in-depth analysis and unique perspective on the latest releases. With a background in film studies, she provides engaging and informative reviews, and keeps readers up to date with industry trends and emerging talents.
