Brazil suffered an energy crisis in the early 21st century. The purpose of this article is to show how the crisis was caused by a kind of institutional blindness. Using the language of the time, I refer to the crisis as a "cognitive blackout". The proposed explanation is that the constraints produced by the evolution of the Brazilian economic culture and conjuncture provide the basis for the cognitive bias and framing that the issue gained at the time. They produced a version of modernity centered on praising the market principle and its corollary ideas such as spontaneity, the short term, and "small is beautiful". All these notions blinded public leaders and other opinion-makers to the idea of long-term planning and the perception of risks that ended up materializing in the energy crisis.
blackout; energy crisis; cognitive sociology; economic culture
