By Ernesto Cazal – Oct 13, 2026We are facing a fundamental asymmetry: the right is imagining possible worlds; the left is not. While this is a nominal restriction regarding the undeniable plurality of the two, it is inevitable to think that we are at a moment—we have been for some time—when the notions of conserving and changing have switched hands. The case of Brazil illustrates this dichotomous inversion very well.On October 4, the Brazilian elections demonstrated a reality that traditional analysts find difficult to digest: Flávio Bolsonaro, Jair Bolsonaro’s son, won the first round against Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. There will be a runoff, with signs of repetition of a similar result. But reducing this scenario to a mere correlation of electoral forces or a historical pendulum means not having understood anything of what is happening. What is at stake in Brazil—and, by extension, in the entire region—is the ontology of the real; the understanding of the existing has ceased to be a political reason of force.While the Brazilian right operates as a machine of fictions that shapes desire, the left has entrenched itself in the nostalgia of administration. The left offers the balance sheet, the peace of institutional cemeteries, and the “administration of the common”; however, it has renounced political imagination. There is no future in the left’s speeches, only the promise of a yesterday that never was. And in the realm of desire and subjectivity, those who cannot imagine the future simply lose it.To understand what is happening, we can turn to Jean Baudrillard. Today “it is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire but our own: The desert of the real itself.” The political territory has been devoured by the map of hyperreality. Governing the hyperreal means the creation of an augmented reality applied to collective and personal subjectivity; it is about creating an environment where simulation is denser, more urgent, and more true than material facts.Another concept can help us judge this moment: hyperstition, that is, when certain fictions give rise to real counterparts. Is Bolsonarism a reflection of Brazilian society? Or is it rather a feedback loop, an entity traveling from a dystopian future —which can be foreseen today— to colonize the present? Through technology, understood as a machine of subjectivation, affections have been reconfigured. The evidence that Big Tech has played in favor of the Brazilian right and to the detriment of Lula’s candidacy only confirms that algorithms, digital communication networks, and neopentecostal churches operate on the same ontological frequency.And it is impossible to read this machinery of desire without looking to the north. The Pentecostal expansion in Brazil is markedly US and Israeli in origin: it is the theopolitical expression of imperial dominance over the region. The “spiritual war” preached by prosperity churches is the mystical translation of algorithmic and geopolitical warfare. The empire no longer needs to occupy the tropics territorially: it has occupied their unconscious, colonized their imagination through a theology that fuses financial success, political bestiality, and the digital miracle.Facing this onslaught, the left falls into the naive trap of late enlightenment and provokes a tricky question: can data kill narrative? The answer is a resounding no. Data by itself is mute, a statistical corpse. Data only comes to life, only wounds or consoles, when it is captured from a narrated statement. While the right does not debate the economic data but intercepts it through the narrative of grievance, lost purity, and moral crusade, seizing the data through myth, the left, on the other hand, presents the data as a fetish of rationality, ignoring that in the desert of the real, subjectivity is not driven by evidence but by affections, fears, and promises of redemption. It has forgotten the modern teaching of Hobbes and Spinoza: that passions are the basis of political reason.The Donroe Doctrine of Epstein Nears Completion: Brazil Makes a Last Stand for Latin America, as Israeli Influence ExpandsFor example, in the midst of this hyperreal whirlwind, one might ask: what kind of state, society, life do you want?There is no answer. The ordinary citizen, filled with functional answers, does not question this. The common citizen does not do it because hyperreality has closed off the space for questioning. The augmented reality in which the voter is immersed demands that they choose a tribe to survive in the desert. The question of the “State” and “society” belongs to a time when the map still tried to represent the territory. Today, the territory is the desert and the State is merely another avatar on the screen, a mythical entity that can be an authoritarian messiah or a corrupt demon, but never an institution of social pact. The leviathans have transformed into another type of political animal.The upcoming runoff in Brazil will determine what kind of simulacrum will hold the monopoly on violence and grace. The left will have to decide whether to continue trying to manage a crumbling desert or if it is finally capable of drinking from the fountain of desire to reimagine a world worth inhabiting. Or if we must build, with historical memory in one hand and the other dirty from raking the land that gave us birth, a political alternative that does not only respond to dystopia*. Otherwise, the map of hyperreality will have won forever, and the remnants of the real will have disappeared under the digital sand of the tropics. *What that would imply would be a matter for reflection beyond the confines of a simple opinion piece. (Misión Verdad)Translation: Orinoco TribuneOT/SC/CD