Saramago and the Paradox of the Herd
“The heroic thing in a human being is not to belong to a Herd” wrote José Saramago, a man who, ironically to many, belonged to the Portuguese Communist Party for most of his life. The sentence seems to contradict his biography, but perhaps it reveals exactly what defines Saramago’s consciousness: the tension between seeking the collective and refusing to surrender individuality.
For Saramago, the Herd is not just the submissive crowd under a visible shepherd. It symbolizes the surrender of consciousness, the comfort of accepting others’ truths instead of thinking for oneself, whether those truths come from the Church, the Market, or the Party. The writer, who distrusted gods and masters alike, perceived the danger of every belief that demands unanimity. And yet, he continued to believe in a possible humanity, more just and fraternal.
Here lies the paradox: the communist who rejects shepherds, the militant who distrusts leaders, the atheist who seeks the sacred in human dignity. In Saramago, communism is less a doctrine than an ethical hope, an attempt to rescue man from selfishness, not another way to imprison him.
The heroism of “not belonging to a Herd ” is therefore not about isolation but about staying awake within any collective. It means thinking even when everyone repeats, feeling even when the system commands hardness, doubting even one’s own faith in utopia.
Saramago lived the conflict of every lucid spirit: to be communist without being conformist, universal without being abstract, human without being complicit. And perhaps that is where true heroism resides, in knowing that freedom begins where the flock ends, yet still walking among the wolves, trying to teach them to think.