was king of the Kingdom of Pontus, a state located in northern Anatolia. His father, Mithridates 5th, ruled Pontus until he was murdered by poison. Fearing that he would suffer a similar fate, Mithridates 6th began ingesting small doses of different types of poison daily as a way of developing tolerance. Ironically, this strategy had unexpected consequences: when he tried to commit suicide after the invasion of Pontus by the Roman Empire, he was unsuccessful due to the high degree of immunity he had acquired. Which led him to order a guard to assassinate him.
The practice gave rise to the term “mitridization”, the process by which living organisms, through continuous and increasing exposure to certain toxins, develop resistance or immunity to them. This is a mechanism based on progressive sensitization and the production of specific defenses against the toxic agent.
For many analysts, exposure to plots and tensions will lead to counter processes of autocratization. This is an extension of the maxim “what does not kill (democracy) strengthens”.
In other words, a democratic system can, when facing smaller, manageable challenges (the “small doses of poison”), develop defense mechanisms, flexibility and institutional strengthening that make it more robust against greater threats in the future. A related idea has to do with adaptation and immunity: the ability to debate, adjust policies, amend laws and learn from mistakes (political “mitridatization”) can prevent systemic collapses.
The image, however, does not capture the main issue: the incentive structure. Yes, punishing the perpetrators of attempts to subvert Brazilian democracy effectively changes this structure and will have a dissuasive effect. But, in reality, this had already occurred to some extent because the observed outcome was a non-event: there was no coup, mainly due to an endogenous veto, and not due to resistance from checks and balances institutions.
Although robust horizontal accountability institutions —Judiciary and lato sensu control institutions— can have a dissuasive effect, vertical accountability, exercised by the electorate through elections, is especially vulnerable to appeals from populist leaders. History provides many examples, but among us the most striking case that the poison did not produce antibodies but its opposite, in a kind of Stockholm syndrome, was the Estado Novo (1937-1945) inaugurated by a self-coup by Getúlio.
After almost nine years — the only period in which the Brazilian Congress and state Legislative Assemblies remained closed —, from November 10, 1937 to September 23, 1946, the dictator was not only spared, but celebrated in the infamous episode of Queremismo, not only by the electorate, but above all by the same sectors of the left that had suffered harsh repression under his rule. The counterfactual exercise — what would have happened if Getúlio had been punished and imprisoned — tells us a lot about our illiberal tradition.
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