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Some time ago I heard a lady, a veteran Novembrist among those who have the mission of teaching us to think correctly, to speak of the existence of the activity of “commentariat” as a kind of profession, or even a priesthood. As the information was conveyed during a humorous program, I deduced that it was a joke inserted in the context, but by the way the talk went I ended up concluding that the lady was serious.

Out of citizen vice, I always try to keep up with the evolutions — and also, because they are more frequent — with the involutions of the Portuguese language; and so moved I went to consult the dictionary of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences, the Great Dictionary of the Portuguese Language of the Circle of Readers and also, as a force of habit, the very up-to-date dictionary of Porto Editora and I did not find the word “commentariat”.

We are, then, faced with a neologism that is supposed to be ahead of time in these times when the voracity of supposedly informative messages exceeds the speed of time. At the head of the most credible dictionaries of the native language is for sure.

I elaborated on the subject at greater length, because despite the urgencies of life I will never be able to reach the agility and promptness of the card-carrying commentators of the media, capable of identifying at a glance the “historical moments” that follow one another at a speed never seen at any time, and I have even succeeded — my presumption? — to get some light of what I suppose to be the so-called “commentariat”.

In a somewhat empirical way, it seems to be the concept aggregating the group of people above banal, enlightened and predestined citizens with levels of wisdom unattainable by ordinary mortals and who, therefore, have gained a seat in the Olympus of corporate and related media; these being the disguised as “public” — more properly public-private partnerships.

Trying to advance methodically from deduction to deduction, I found that commentary, serving as an indispensable complement to the news information endorsed by the bosses of communication — and others — should be considered a corporate institution. No association or community, but a corporation more at the service of large corporations. A guarantee of strengthening the power of the “Commentariat”, as with the gods, is everywhere and, although here and there undermined by some very honourable exceptions, mistakes that in most cases are quickly corrected, it teaches us to understand what the news prepared by corporate journalism, in excellent Anglo-Saxon Portuguese, explains to us in the first instance.

One priesthood, one mission

In their atavistic and also induced ignorance, ordinary citizens, all of us, may not properly understand the raw reality that the news exposes.

To prevent the possible misunderstandings generated by the primary news material from harming the magnificent and homogeneous behavioural texture of the social fabric we form, there are commentators teaching us black and white what the news data put on the air mean, sometimes insufficient because technically subjugated by “objectivity”.

In addition to a corporation, the “commentariat” is a priesthood, a mission. The commentators hover over us playing the role of missionaries who recommend with patient but firm vehemence what we should think, how we should act, even if the facts point, with their malicious logic, in a different or even opposite direction; who bluntly define who are the good and the bad of this world, lest the enemies and detractors of the catechism of the “civilized” “rules-based international order” make us fall into heresy. That teach us to respect their sovereign pluralism, applied in such a way that the results of the exercise of our freedom to look at and interpret the world coincide exactly with those they preach.

The missionaries of the “commentariat” must also be experts in demonstrating to us that what we are seeing is not what we are seeing, thus correcting a kind of parallax error that is quite frequent in the face of the peculiarities of the official reality, a phenomenon that must be attributed to the damned subliminal terrorism disseminated by enemies, always on the lookout and diligent.

In extreme cases, fortunately rare, the practitioners of commentariat have an obligation to correct, if necessary firmly, the moderators who dare to pose inadmissible hypotheses and questions, perhaps the result of remote echoes of the bursts of enemy messages.

Commentators, in short, are priests who spread the word of the single opinion and of obligatory thought so that the unquestionable norms of the regime destined to extend to the whole world may prevail, taking with it true civilization; that is, the cult of authentic truth, of the human rights that interest us, of the religious precepts inherent to civilizational and racial supremacy, of the certification that guarantees us the possession of the goods of the world, in short, the pluralism proper to genuine, liberal (neoliberal, to be more precise), Western, humanist and Christian democracy.

It is not surprising, of course, that the “commentariat” is an emanation of war as an instrument that is always available and justified so that the rights of “our civilization” are not called into question, especially when it comes to barbaric, savage, even sub-human enemies, threatening the delights of “our garden” lovingly cared for. Peace is not a matter for commentators, except that which guarantees that they are at the end of the road to war.

Observing the commentators in action, especially the members of that dominant fraternity from the university Areopagus, from the fortune of political science, from the conspiratorial catacombs of the Anglo-Saxon think tanks or from the MBA masters of the enlightened Ivy League establishments, is an illustrative practice to understand the reasons why “liberal democracy” cannot do without them and has even elevated them to the status of a corporation.

They are the knights-errant of the sacrosanct principles of freedom of opinion, of speech, of thought, the Argonauts of civilized debate. Its mission can be summed up as follows: to cultivate a parallel reality in which each and every one of us will end up immersed; or to take care of the flock of the faithful of the “liberal democracy” until there is no lost sheep, sheep or lamb.

Infallible as the Popes

Commentators are experts in using different words and expressions to say exactly the same thing and induce obligatory conclusions — theirs, those of the regime; they are always apt for heated debates, fencing arguments that simulate disparities on topics on which, after all, they agree; They fictionalize with theatrical talents the antagonisms between the side of the situation and the side of the opposition (and vice versa), which both practice the same policy when they alternate in government. This is an art, a gift.

The performances of gifted commentators — putative presidents of a predictable “Order of Commentariat” — born with the gift of incarnating pluralism in a single person, at once government and opposition, interpreters of the allegedly antagonistic ideologies that give life to liberal democracy, cannot be left unclear. Finally, they were graced with the rare anointing of being able to be themselves and their opposites simultaneously. Maybe he's a little schizophrenic, but he's genius, no doubt. This is so much so that large information corporations have hired them to fulfil the advisable quotas of pluralism of opinion. They deserve it; and one of these geniuses followed the natural path for those who exhibit such attributes: that of President of the Portuguese Republic.

“Commentariat”, in short, can be considered one of the dictatorial components of the authoritarian system into which the economic, political and social regime most convenient to neoliberal savagery is being transformed.

The commentators carried out by the regime, which they also maliciously call “gang of fakers”, will say that this interpretation is typical of the enemies, of those who try to subvert “our civilization”. The same ones who are concerned with proving how liberal democracy sees no inconvenience in walking arm in arm with emanations of Nazi-fascism, namely Ukrainian Nazism; and which testify to NATO’s operational connection with Nazi-Banderist military units integrated into the hosts of the new Western invasion of Russia. The “commentariat” cuts through these evil lucubrations, exposing, as they should, the parallel reality that they fabricate and impose so that “our civilization” survives. Hence the dogma: there are no Nazis in Ukraine, no genocidal fascists in Israel or other Western beacons.

The commentaries copied from the popes the gift of being infallible; As such, commentators are always on the side of reason and never have doubts.