Erich Fromm and Michael Maccoby

“All over the world the peasant shows in a general way the same attitudes and compartmental tracts being individualists, conservators, suspicious and reluctant about spending Money (…) this fits better in an agricultural, traditional production system and don’t match with the mechanized agriculture or industries”

In other way “punctuality, discipline, planning and abstract reasoning are necessary to give use to this new features (…) without this tracts of personality no one can ever raise up above the simple level of the manual work”

Portuguese ethos (character) can be materialised in a non productive and parasitic child. as I can see it Portuguese people seems to show an unproductive orientation of the character with receptive and exploration tracts, receptive because people expects everything from the “Papa” estate and Exploratorium in a Marxist way because the ones that don’t expect anything free from the others show an enormous pleasure fooling, cheating and stealing from other (people and state). They are moved by the idea that “the things you can steal from the other looks always better that the ones you can do by yourself” or “the steeled fruits are juicy”. These tracts are showed obviously in the generalised tendency to not pay taxes, to fool the police, to break the rules and it is accepted with a smile from all the population including with applauses and the attribution of a “virtual” medal of honour to the great cheater of the country.


As we can conclude with this two exerts from the work of Eric From: “social work in Mexican village” about the correlation of personality traits with the socio-economical systems, the Portuguese society shows an enormous difficult to do the transition between the traditional and the industrial system. Historically, Portugal is a country that never passed hardly from a industrial period so, the dynamism of the character matrix of general personality of the Portuguese people had never suffered the necessary adaptations to the contemporary way of living in a competitive service production world. Nowadays, in the run to be a developed country, Portugal cannot run out of the peripherical positions, buried by the egoist ideal of separation instead of the unification in great deals. The traditional mentality is also flagrantly seen in the lack of that precious characteristics that makes the first world, the true first world: punctuality, discipline, planning and abstract reasoning. Instead of that we can see Portuguese bad alphabetized, with lack of cultural, political and economical interests, we can see them work with no schedules, with no precision, slowly as if it were doing that for their own subsistence…we can see them with no aims in the future, no objectives, and no mental structure to build a civil society and to go ahead wining.

And the last and more tragic conclusion is that “the scholarship and technical knowledge aren’t enough to transform the ancient peasant in a modern farmer (or an industrial, or a business man) (…) the instruction received by the peasants will probably be useless for their work until their change of mentality or if we prefer change of character. It is indispensable before the alphabetization to make the decisive change”