The word “balbúrdia” (confusion / racket, in English) accurately reflects the critical moment that culture and education are experiencing in Brazil's current socio-political context. Used by the present Minister of Education to discredit and restrict the intellectual and creative autonomy of Brazilian universities, as well as to justify a brutal cut to its financing, it ended up being embraced – in an ironic but not less serious way – by the democratic resistance to an extremist government that has aggravated the polarisation of the society and the country. Taken up as a new battle cry, balbúrdia has gained life in the public space, in the no man's land where Brazil's new culture war is being fought. If it originally simply described a chaotic situation, today it is espoused as an entropic catalyst to, from that very chaos, potentiate the creation of a new social organisation desired to be inclusive, tolerant, egalitarian, diverse, autonomous, creative.