Writing in the 1950s, the playwright Nelson Rodrigues saw his countrymen as afflicted with a sense of inferiority, and he coined a phrase that Brazilians now use to describe it: "the mongrel complex". Brazil has always aspired to be taken seriously as a world power by the heavyweights, and so it pains Brazilians that world leaders could confuse their country with Bolivia, as Ronald Reagan once did, or dismiss a nation so large – it has 180 million people – as "not a serious country", as Charles de Gaulle did.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Writing in the 1950s, the playwright Nelson Rodrigues saw his countrymen as afflicted with a sense of inferiority, and he coined a phrase that Brazilians now use to describe it: "the mongrel complex". Brazil has always aspired to be taken seriously as a world power by the heavyweights, and so it pains Brazilians that world leaders could confuse their country with Bolivia, as Ronald Reagan once did, or dismiss a nation so large – it has 180 million people – as "not a serious country", as Charles de Gaulle did." in the context of "Larry Rohter, "If Brazil Wants to Scare the World, It's Succeeding" (16 November 2007), The New York Times" to mean that wisdom is timeless.