The lilliputization of humanity

Scales are conventions about proportionalities and the relationships between them. The idea of human scale is ancient and present in all cultures. It refers to the proportions of the human body and its surroundings. Marcos Vitruvius, a Roman architect from the 1st century BC, was the first to theorize about human proportionality, which would lead to Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. But there have always been those who have shown the relativity of scales and the rationality that each one generates, since there are no phenomena; there are scales of phenomena. Many will remember Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Gulliver’s encounters with many peoples, including the Lilliput people, human beings fifteen centimeters tall (1726).

With the emergence of the modern era, European colonial expansion, and capitalism, especially from the 19th century onwards, the human scale underwent an important mutation: a change in the relationship between the human scale and the scale of the transformations that humans were capable of carrying out in the world. From then on, the scale of the universal (linked to Renaissance rationalism and the Enlightenment) and the global (linked to colonial expansion and capitalism) became the dominant scales, although concrete human beings continued to live their lives on a particular and local scale.

We can say that the first lilliputization of humans took place then. It was a different kind of lilliputization from Swift's. While Swift treats beings fifteen centimeters and those one meter sixty or seventy tall as equal and of equal rationality, the modern era has come to devalue not only entire peoples encountered by European peoples but has also surreptitiously devalued ordinary human beings in Europe and outside Europe in relation to specialized human beings on universal and global scales (scientists, politicians, technicians, navigators, traders).

The last hundred years have seen two apparently contradictory movements that have further destabilized the human scale. On the one hand, physics, chemistry, and then biology have taken the small to the confines of the tiny. To the atomic, the subatomic, and, finally, the quantum. In computer science, the movement has been from bit to qubit. The journey to the unimaginably small has been undertaken to reach the unimaginably large in terms of the energy and reality-transforming power it can generate.

Given the competition between who produces the most powerful quantum computer, the Canticle of Canticles of Solomon will soon be surpassed in grandeur (although not in beauty) by the Quantum of Quantums! Space travel and the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki represent the two poles of the immense creative and destructive power resulting from the surpassing of the human scale. This explosion of power has had multiple consequences. I will highlight some of those that point to the fatal miniaturization of the human scale.

The dronification of power and resistance

Military drones are used here as a metonymy for a form of power so powerful that it doesn't have to worry about retaliation from its enemies; it doesn't imagine having to prepare for defeat, nor does it celebrate victory, because victory is a routine day's work in front of a computer, and it has no heroes because its heroes are computer programs that don't know their superiors. It represents the paroxysm of irregular warfare, which violates all the main conventions of war.

The main characteristics of this form of power are: extremely unequal power relations; no obligation to follow the same rules of the game as the adversary; secrecy, speed, technological superiority, electronic time, informality, and surprise as modes of operation to ensure the greatest possible destruction or accumulation, depending on the circumstances; and collateral damage as an obsolete idea. Dronified power is a form of power that doesn't fear its enemies or rivals in the slightest, shamelessly flaunting its supposed invulnerability. Its way of being in history is to conceive of itself as outside history. It works through electronic time, with a logic of eternal durability, and, lately, with artificial intelligence, it has achieved almost limitless power.

The dronification of power occurs not only in military circles and on the battlefields of target countries or populations but also in many other areas of social life. With adaptations, we find the same pattern for the exercise of power in areas as diverse as widespread impunity for police brutality and political corruption; mercenaries and paramilitary groups hired to expel unarmed peasants or indigenous peoples from their territories, by assassination if necessary, to make land available for industrial agriculture or “development” megaprojects; undeclared states of exception to provide exceptional privileges to powerful groups or inflict horrendous suffering on groups seen as enemies.

The social domains in which the dronification of power is probably most visible are financial capital and large media companies. In the global financial world, self-regulated finance capital gives its main players the ability to launch credit rating drones or speculative interest rates at a target country in order to suffocate its economy and cause or deepen its insolvency. As a result, even if a sudden deterioration in real economic indicators is not detectable, large sectors of the population can see their livelihoods dramatically affected from one day to the next by opaque decisions taken by largely unknown, invisible, and irresponsible mega-actors who plunder their salaries, pensions, and savings or take away their homes. In the field of corporate media, the growing concentration of media power offers its owners the prerogative of impunity, imposing political agendas and cancellations that favor them, despite having no democratic mandate or evidence, with devastating consequences for the vast majority of the population.

Faced with this kind of power, the human scale of resistance feels profoundly miniaturized, and with it, humanity itself. The disproportion is such that even the parable of David and Goliath doesn't seem appropriate. It's not a question of humanity being diminished. Humanity is integer; it thinks, feels, and lives normally, but in miniature, when compared to everything that happens around it. What goes on around it is also humanity, but, as seen from its lilliputian existence, it is as rational as it is monstrously inhuman or superhuman. In any case, it doesn't correspond to the human scale. There are two main forms of lilliputization of humanity. Disproportion and trivialization.

Disproportion

The immense wealth of the world's billionaires, the 1%, the speed with which they acquire it, the ostentation with which they display it, and the power, not just economic power, that wealth gives them, is something monstrous for almost all of humanity, the 99%, who work in increasingly precarious ways and without rights in order, at best, to be able to feed their families every day of the month, in addition to the risks they run of being victims of police brutality, of being robbed by gangs that proliferate on the outskirts of cities, of falling ill and not having the money to pay for health insurance, etc. This disproportion and the lack of any realistic mechanism to reduce it, be it progressive taxation, nationalization, or social rights, can lead to despair and violence. Was this the case with the recent murder in New York of Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, a major health insurance company?

Senator Elizabeth Warren, a vocal critic of the US health care system, put her finger on it when she said, “The visceral ¹ response from people across this country who feel cheated, ripped off, and threatened by the vile practices of their insurance companies should be a warning to everyone in the health care system. Violence is never the answer, but people can be pushed only so far. This is a warning that if you push people hard enough, they lose faith in the ability of the government to make change, lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the health care to make change, and start to take matters in their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone.”

Although the senator was later “forced” to retract this statement, it is validated by history. Many of the assassinations carried out by European anarchists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries stemmed from anger at those in power or wealth who were considered discretionary and scandalous. Remembering this history is important because anarchist violence slowed down from the moment unions were authorized, workers began to have better wages and more rights, and the welfare state began to emerge. Apparently this story is not known or is not relevant to those who are now particularly concerned about the safety of the CEOs of large, powerful companies, whose scandalous profits grow to the extent of the suffering and abandonment of millions of people subjected to these companies. According to a report in Politico on December 13, preventive initiatives focus above all on new technologies and more human security resources against what they strangely call domestic terrorism.

In Brazil, this disproportion is no less dramatic. Despite the good performance of the Lula government under all conditionalities, a Quaest poll on December 4 reveals that financial market agents far prefer (by more than 80%) a far-right candidate to Lula da Silva². The current speculation against the real (the Brazilian currency) shows that we are not dealing with mere voting intentions. We are dealing with policies already underway to destroy Brazilian democracy. None of this requires bad faith or “reactionary ideology” on the part of those surveyed. It's just a matter of following the rationality of the “markets”, as capitalism is now called. More than ever, today's capitalism prefers the road to dictatorship as the shortest way to guarantee the profitability of rentiers.

Trivialization

To trivialize is to accept something as banal, neither positive nor negative. It corresponds to a psychic state of indifference and, ultimately, cynicism. Two examples among many illustrate my point.

Israel's destruction of the Middle East, and especially the genocide in Gaza, and the indifference of those who could put an end to it, is a particularly violent attack on our humanity that is repeated daily. Where are the UN, the World Health Organization, the International Criminal Court, the Arab League, African Unity, the European Union, the Pope? The images go by too fast for us to see without seeing ourselves reflected in them. So that we can't even imagine that our humanity is being reduced to rubble and that the (increasingly small) white plastic bags thrown into mass graves carry fragments of our humanity in them. We are the lilliputians before a degenerate Gulliver. Grotesque images of the vilest animalistic brutalism.

The second illustration is the recent report by the US government's Department of Housing and Urban Development, according to which the homeless population grew by 18% over the previous year. This increase is 39% for families with children. We're talking about 770,000 more people. This scandal, taking place in the richest country in the world, is not being reported in any mainstream media. The anger of the homeless is confined to the landings of the buildings in which they take shelter. On the other hand, the best US propagandists, such as Fareed Zakaria, while acknowledging some internal problems and trivializing them as footnotes, proclaim the vitality of the empire and its ability to defeat all possible rivals.

The resistance of the lilliputians

Lemuel Gulliver visited many peoples on his many journeys until a Portuguese ship rescued him and brought him to Europe. It wasn't a happy return, because once back in his homeland, Gulliver preferred to spend his days talking to horses rather than to humans. But humanity, which has been lilliputized by multiple mechanisms on an inhuman scale, can't afford to talk only to animals, plants, or walls, although sometimes there seems to be no other option. But after all, Swift's lilliputians managed to immobilize Gulliver when one day they decided to do so. To do this, they got together, gathered a lot of people, a lot of ladders, and a lot of ropes, and put a lot of time and effort into the task. They succeeded.

In the modern era, and especially after the 19th century, the task of resistance was left to specialists, be they historical subjects, avant-garde intellectuals, or revolutionary parties, and the instruments they used were not very diverse and, except for a few historical moments, failed to bring together majorities. Eurocentric critical thinking has to travel the world to get to know other peoples, other struggles, other narratives, other strategies, and scales before it can aspire to have the people and forces necessary to immobilize the Gulliver of our time, the 1%, and everything that makes him possible. It sounds ludicrous, but in the inverted logic of the dominant scales (wealth first, humanity second), 99% is less than 1%.