Expectations are a central element of human action – 06/03/2023 – Michael França

“Hey, the way I am here on the hill, selling drugs to eat rice and beans, I’ll never get there. I was already involved in crime a million. My mother died, my brothers died, I had nothing to lose. Then came a little light: it’s not because you don’t have your mother that you won’t study. You’ll have to study and sing at the same time. So I started school”.

That’s what musician and actor Mauro Mateus dos Santos, also known by his stage name Sabotage, said in an interview. The last before he was shot four times in the head and once in the chest.

Expectations are a central element of human action. They are the result of decoding the wide range of information that surrounds us. Every moment we come into contact with new experiences. Through them we make inferences about the potential results of our choices.

The expected return of each path guides the behavior. It is no coincidence, for example, that some spend a large part of their lives studying. The average education wage premium is high. However, it is not the same between different groups in society.

Research shows that, even considering a similar level of education, there are other factors that cause those belonging to the most prominent groups to get a greater return on their skills than the rest. This enters into the decision-making process and negatively affects the educational choices and career paths of minorities.

In the world of crime, the scenario is not much different. It can also be thought from the perspective of individual and collective expectations. Individuals compare the expected return between going into criminal activity and staying within the bounds of the law. In the midst of this, there are several institutions that represent a means of generating social training.

Creating strict laws, expanding policing and intensifying punishment for crimes are some ways to coerce people to follow certain paths. They represent a means of decreasing the expected return of some choices. However, the added cost is not usually low. In the Brazilian context, in addition to the lost lives of police and civilians, there are also high expenses to maintain a penitentiary and justice system that, not infrequently, acts in a biased way.

In the case of illicit drugs, we know that, despite their damage, consumption is not eliminated just by the force of law and the will of part of society. Their offer tends to continue because there is a demand that is difficult to repress. This demand means that the expected return of participating in some illegal activities, especially for socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, is many times higher than that of following other paths.

Such a demand has no social class. Although deaths usually do. In the end, thousands of young people die. They also die to numb a part of an elite that emerges almost unscathed from this process of crushing people.

In the case of Sabotage, the Maestro of the Canon, he started selling drugs at the age of eight. He had his cousins ​​murdered. At the age of 15 he had already lost his mother and brothers. However, something made him change his expectations and, thus, his path. In doing so, he ended up becoming a great voice for an excluded and abused part of the country.

While it revolutionized rap, it frustrated society’s expectations of it. But in the end, it failed to counteract its own life expectancy. He was murdered around 5:50 am. Right after he took his wife to work. He died at the age of 29 with five gunshot wounds to his body.

This text is a tribute to the song “Mun Rá”, by Sabotage. At one point, he says: “The itinerary of a whorehouse is Brazilian Brazil”. It seems to me a way, perhaps even more sophisticated, of saying: “Brazil is not for beginners”.

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