He Who Makes All Things Small

What would a Napoleon or a Julius Caesar do today? Where would the great figures of the past — commanders, artists, prophets — project their ambition if they had been born in our time? Would they become financiers, entrepreneurs, influencers?

These questions open up a reflection on the decline of collective missions, offering a key to reading our century: an age in which the only surviving narrative is the one each individual possesses for themselves.

A brief examination of historiography and sociology reveals that, throughout the arc of human societies, elites tended predominantly to occupy roles within the political, military, religious, academic and intellectual spheres. In these domains, the exercise of individual potency — in the Nietzschean sense — was intertwined with functions of collective legitimation, inscribed within shared narratives of common destiny.

A combination of material and cultural factors that we will not explore here in detail — technological revolution, American hegemony, the neoliberal economic paradigm — has progressively shifted the centre of gravity toward forms of individual accumulation and legitimation, detached from collective projects.

The public sphere formally preserves its institutional architecture, yet it increasingly tends to be reduced to a mere regulatory apparatus for economic flows, losing both its centrality and its capacity for collective mobilisation. The field of political action today appears cumbersome, suffocated by bureaucracy, devoid of appeal and concrete outlets; an eclipse that favours the rise of the market as the most viable arena of action.

The market, indeed, presents itself as a dynamic, efficient and scalable arena: a theatre of individual, generalised and permanent competition, where the subject is pushed into a logic of self-optimisation and endless accumulation. Profit becomes the only measure of status and achievement, the final degraded form of that will to power which no longer creates worlds, but accumulates things. It is in this scenario that the total commodification of existence is fulfilled: an ontological tyranny that compresses the horizon of human vision into a single, suffocating point: oneself.

“What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?” — thus asks the last man, and blinks. The earth has then become small, and upon it hops the last man, who makes everything small.

(F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra)

The last man no longer believes in creation as poiesis, in a higher star, in Love as the opposite of utility and self-interest; he merely winks cynically, swollen with the pragmatism of one who confidently pursues his own individual wellbeing, his own “happiness”, in the desert of nothingness. The great narratives — national, religious, ideological — have lost their force, and with them the moral authority of long-standing hierarchies. What follows is the recent emergence of new elites, organised around two complementary and dominant poles.

On one side, an oligarchy of the image: visible, hungry for attention and influence. On the other, an invisible plutocracy, strengthened by patrimonial possession and financial control.

The former is refracted through the fragmented crystallisation of the always-on virtual spectacle. The ego-centric mechanisms of social platforms — the quantification of popularity, desire, interactions, status — developed not by chance within American “culture”, have amplified and promoted individualistic tendencies, creating narcissistic micro-bubbles that elbow one another through content in order to inflate themselves on their tiny individual showcase.

Here, power is not measured in control but in attention. One does not possess; one appears and advertises oneself. Visibility reigns over virtue, and everything is flattened onto the surface of the screen. Roles once distinct — artist, politician, entrepreneur, journalist — are diluted into a single figure of permanent exhibition, transformed into human commodities defined by personal branding and subjected to the imperative of expository transparency.

Specularly, at the opaque summit of the global pyramid, there is an elite that deliberately avoids public visibility, operating discreetly and structurally. These are the true custodians of wealth, of the immense flows of money that run abundantly through the corridors of high finance, where an exclusive and silent pseudo-aristocracy operates: investment banking, private equity, family offices, funds and global holdings.

Here, power shuns publicity: it has no need for followers or consensus, because it possesses an effective control that has every interest in remaining low-profile. It acts behind opaque glass, in a liquid and transnational space where peoples, laws and borders are surpassed and subordinated. In this context, power is exercised through technical and managerial levers — asset valuations, financial leverage, the buying and selling of companies — by an elite of owners that requires neither public consent nor moral legitimation, detached from any historical or national rootedness. In this way, it imposes itself through a power superior to that of worn-out democratic political institutions.

If the masses compete beneath the virtual spotlight, fighting over the gaze, the financial pseudo-aristocracy possesses the levers. In neither of these two categories can personal success be said to be connected in any meaningful way to that of a social group, a collective good, an idea or value that transcends the individual and is rooted in history.

As the culmination of this drift into communal emptiness and reduction to the economic, large corporations rise up as substitutes for “intermediate bodies”. Devoid of symbolic foundations, they try to fill the absence of mythopoietic roots by equipping themselves with an apparatus of communicative artifices: brand identity, corporate storytelling, mission statements, purpose-driven narratives — an entire range of Anglicisms describing marketing devices designed to imitate, while parodying, the narrative and symbolic content once proper to historical communities, religious institutions, and great ideological and national narratives.

In a market elevated to the sole plane of action of polemos, the company clumsily attempts to dress itself in a “soul” in order to generate belonging and emotional charge, compensating for the absence of intrinsic meaning in its sole and bare reason for existence: profit.

In the absence of shared higher ends, of ideal and political battles, the market becomes the place where power replaces potency: where the individual project takes the place of the capacity to embody a collective destiny. It is in this existential configuration that the character traits most functional to permanent competition among atomised monads triumph: incessant performativity, virtual narcissism, instrumental calculation.

Ethics, moral principles, civic virtues — everything that exceeds pure economic rationality — tends to lose status, becoming nothing more than an obstacle along the path to personal success. In this progressive reduction of meaning to performance, the two eminent faces of contemporary rationalisation, digitalisation and financialisation, serve as faithful measures for sounding the depth of nothingness; our age appears as the summit of an inverted mountain along the axis of meaning.

“A generation consecrated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken…”

(F. S. Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise)

The artist, as the most sensitive antenna to the wind of his time, had already perceived in America a century ago ambition decaying into mere greed, atomisation elevated into destiny, individual value raised as the measure of everything. This is the American Dream; there, among its clouds, faiths have gone extinct, everything has grown smaller, and the individual remains imprisoned within himself: a commodity-monad that no longer finds expression on the deck of a ship, but clings to the raft of its own ego in order to orient itself across the sea of nothingness, without a star to transcend it and show it the way.

The only remaining anchor is the cult of the self: a small and fragile simulacrum, colourless, outside history and impermeable to love.

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He Who Makes All Things Small