In this country, you cannot say with impunity that resulting from the mixture of black, white or indigenous people are not a subcategory of black. A young master's student thought she could turn this into a research agenda at a public university. They showed him the street door, after forced attempts at ideological re-education. At a certain point, the student was no longer treated as someone who discussed hegemonic positions, asked new questions and wanted to re-examine assumptions, but as a fool, an enemy or immoral. How is this possible? And, above all, how is this possible in a university? It's simple: dogmatism continues to be a intellectual trend this season. We know well what dogmatism is because modern thought was forged in the fight against it. In political philosophy, dogma is the conviction that faith or authority places beyond the reach of reason. The Enlightenment, which rebels against dogmatism and obscurantism, stated that human progress and life in common depend on what can be examined by intelligence and freely discussed in search of enlightened consensus. Nothing should be beyond the reach of rational and free examination; There is no belief, law or principle that cannot be discussed. In social psychology, dogmatism is a rigid way of thinking. The emphasis is on inflexibility: the dogmatic individual resists contrary evidence, avoids doubt, closes himself to dissent and conceives of his positions as fixed. It's a way of thinking. Whether this trait appears more on the right or on the extremes of both sides remains the classic controversy in the field. There are consistent results to support both theses. What surprises today are two things. First, that precisely the institutional arenas par excellence of freedom of thought — universities and journalism, where questions are asked, consensuses are challenged and certainties are tested — have become some of the main spaces of dogmatism and orthodoxy. It is more than paradoxical, it is contradictory, but these are the facts. Second, that the progressive position, which fought for centuries for science, criticism, emancipation and demystification, is now the protagonist of a new dogmatic wave. Progressives do not hesitate to declare that certain propositions are indisputable in principle, beyond the reach of the scrutiny of reason, shielded from the audacity of intelligence. The social environments in which they predominate form closed, dogmatic, intolerant minds. They deny facts that do not fit into their beliefs or that make them uncomfortable, they avoid divergent books, people and ideas, they grossly simplify the opposing camp ("it's all the same thing"), they more easily accept the use of force against divergent views, they depend on orthodoxy and begin to criminalize positions they do not tolerate. The Enlightenment promised to liberate doubt; progressives reclassified it as an offense, to silence it. None of this has to do with thematic importance. According to the recently released book "Brasil no Espelho", by Felipe Nunes, 96% of Brazilians think that God is in charge of their lives. For a large part of the population, issues related to life after death, the existence of an omnipotent God and a moral order created by him are what matter most in the life of a human being — perhaps the only thing that really matters. Now, in this country, it is not considered a crime, immorality or indelible stain on one's character to not believe in God or natural moral law. Almost 80% say, for example, that someone can be a good person even without faith. Now say that black people, like everyone else, can be racist; that structural or environmental racism are debatable hypotheses; that public policies based on racial or identity quotas may be neither fair nor efficient; that "woman" is not synonymous with "person who menstruates"; that mestizos are not second-class blacks; that there are no cis people; that competence in the subject is not a lesser value than diversity; that feminism should not be a fight against men, but against inequality; that, in a rigorous concept of democracy, there must be room for the right and for conservatives — and watch the magic happen. There is no need to state otherwise; All it takes is "I would like to re-discuss this point" to discover what dogmatism does to those who challenge it. It is surprising, but in the new dogmatic intellectual consensus, it is safer to doubt the existence of God than to ask to re-discuss any clause of the progressive catechism. Columns Receive a selection of Folha columns in your email LINK PRESENT: Did you like this text? Subscribers can access seven free accesses from any link per day. Just click the blue F below.