Abstract
The last years of the twentieth century witnessed great changes all across the face of the Earth. The world became unified by virtue of the new technical conditions that served as solid foundations for worldwide human action. However, this action imposes itself upon the greater part of humanity as a perverse globalization. Let us consider in the first place the emergence of a double tyranny, that of money and that of information, which are intimately correlated. Together, both provide the bases of the ideological system that legitimates the most characteristic actions of this epoch. At the same time, this double tyranny looks to conform social and interpersonal relations to a new ethos, thus influencing people’s characters. The competitiveness suggested by production and consumption is the source of new totalitarianisms that are more easily accepted due to the installation of a confusion of spirits. The production, at the very basis of the social life, of a structural violence has similar origins, which can be easily recognized in the states’, companies’, and individuals’ forms of action. Systemic perversity is one of its corollaries.
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- 1.
T.N.: Santos here writes potência rather than poder. Since English lacks a satisfactory equivalent to these two terms, we have chosen to translate both as ‘power’. This is a common problem in translations from Romance languages into English, and particularly for translators of writers like Spinoza, for whom these distinctions are conceptually important (cf. the preface to Michael Hardt’s translation of Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly (1991)).
- 2.
T.N.: In Portuguese, Santos writes that ‘Concorrer e competir não são a mesma coisa’. In English, both concorrer and competir are normally translated as ‘to compete’. However, in the way Santos utilizes them, concorrer would imply a beneficial competition, while competir could be understood as a competition undertaken at all costs. With this in mind, we have translated concorrer as ‘contention’.
- 3.
T.N.: In the Portuguese, Santos writes ‘o poder (potência) deve ser também exercido em estado puro’, with one term bracketed as an appositive of the other. This reinforces our decision, as per our previous note on the poder/potência distinction, to render both terms as ‘power’.
- 4.
T.N.: The original text indicates 14 million child deaths per day, which appears to be a typographical error on Santos’s part. We have taken the liberty of replacing the word day for year, which is likelier to have been Santos’s intent.
- 5.
T.N.: In this passage the author plays on the phrase mais-que-perfeito, which is the Portuguese name for the pluperfect verb tense. Mais-que-perfeito literally means ‘more than perfect’; hence, the irony.
- 6.
T.N.: Santos uses this term in English. We have elected to keep his italicization to convey something of the implicit emphasis of the original text.
- 7.
T.N.: Santos often utilizes the metaphor of ‘prosthesis’ for the different human works such as roads, bridges, plantations, buildings, and cities. In the case of the individual, after a certain amount of time is spent using a prosthesis, it is difficult to tell what is part of the body and what is an artificial addition. The same happens to the territory. For Santos’s other usages of this metaphor, see M. Santos, A Natureza do Espaço, 1996.
- 8.
T.N.: Note here the distinction between the lower-case American revolution and the upper-case French Revolution, which could be interpreted as a privileging of the latter over the former.
- 9.
T.N.: Although this phrase is typically written in capital letters as a proper noun, we follow Santos in rendering it in the lower case.
- 10.
T.N.: The war between places (guerra dos lugares in Portuguese) is a concept of Santos’s that makes reference to the competition between places, cities, and regions for investments from companies. It is related to those who offer the most attractive fiscal and infra-structural incentives in order to convince companies to install plants in their territories.
- 11.
T.N.: ‘States’ here refers to the Brazilian governmental subdivisions. Rather than departments or provinces, Brazil is subdivided in 26 states, plus the Federal District.
- 12.
T.N.: This term, too, appears in English in Santos’s source text. We have maintained his use of italics to convey emphasis.
- 13.
T.N.: ‘Technological fix’ appears in English in the original text.
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Santos (Deceased), M. (2017). A Perverse Globalization. In: Toward an Other Globalization: From the Single Thought to Universal Conscience. Pioneers in Arts, Humanities, Science, Engineering, Practice, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53892-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53892-1_3
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