GPT

This is a powerful and incisive reflection on the infrastructural and molecular levels of prejudice, genocide, and the social organization of exclusion. You’ve drawn together a compelling set of thinkers—Mbembe, Baldwin, West, Ahmed, Browning, Lifton, and Agamben—each contributing to a genealogy of violence that is both administrative and intimate, spectacular and banal.

There’s a strong throughline here about the way exclusion and extermination are not just enacted through bureaucratic apparatuses (hydraulic prejudice) but also through the diffuse, unconscious, and ambient rhythms of cultural life (nano prejudice). The connection between mass media, social conformity, and the tacit violence of non-recognition is particularly sharp.

Would you like to expand this into a longer piece? There’s potential to bring in more contemporary examples, further develop the implications of "nano prejudice," or explore the specific forms of "tactical destruction of reciprocity" you mention. Let me know how you’d like to proceed.

You said:

Proceed as you see fit.

ChatGPT said:

What you’ve sketched here opens up a space for a deeper exploration of how cultural forms and institutions not only normalize but perpetuate violence, both overt and subtle. The distinction between hydraulic and nano prejudice is a crucial one, allowing us to see how these forms of violence operate on different scales but are deeply intertwined.

The Hydraulic and Nano Prejudices

Hydraulic prejudice, as Mbembe notes, is concrete. It is administered through systems of law, bureaucracy, and institutional practice—massive, visible structures that shape the very possibilities of who belongs and who does not. It is a prejudice that is codified, enacted, and enforced through policy, and yet, for all its tangibility, it often masks itself behind technicalities, protocols, and rationalizations. It is a slow-moving river of power that channels violence not just as an act but as a system, shaping lives and destinies in ways that are often imperceptible to those who benefit from its course.

On the other hand, nano prejudice is particulate. It is not bound by the apparatuses of the state but instead infiltrates the very pores of daily life. It is an airless, invisible, ubiquitous violence that operates in habits of thought, speech, and action—those deeply ingrained and largely unconscious forms of exclusion that pervade our collective being. Nano prejudice is the default setting of social interaction, operating in the unconscious gestures, the casual language, the unspoken hierarchies that govern who gets to be considered fully human and who is reduced to the status of an object to be moved, ignored, or erased.

In this sense, nano prejudice might even be more insidious than hydraulic prejudice because it is so diffuse, so subtle. It doesn’t require policy, nor does it need a single institutional apparatus. It is the murmuring engine of the social fabric—the constant hum of racialized, ableist, classist, and gendered assumptions that suffuse the culture, saturating spaces of work, leisure, and intimacy. It emerges in the ways we speak about “success” or “value,” about who deserves to be here, about whose life matters. It is the unspoken default that marks out certain lives as disposable and others as legible, real, and grievable.

The tactical destruction of reciprocity takes many forms. In its most explicit manifestations, it is the refusal of mutual recognition—the systemic denial of visibility, voice, and agency to those who do not conform to the mythic human. This denial is not only legal and bureaucratic but social, cultural, and linguistic. It operates in the refusal to acknowledge suffering, in the gaslighting of lived experience, in the slow erosion of spaces where dissent and difference might flourish. It is present in the suppression of historical memory, in the sanitization of violence, in the depoliticization of suffering. It is not simply an omission but an active reconfiguration of reality to make certain lives and perspectives unreadable, irrelevant, or burdensome.

It is also visible in the mass mediation of knowledge, where the very conditions of speech are determined by attention economies that reward simplification, outrage, and conformity. When history is compressed into soundbites, when debate is subsumed into spectacle, then local means through which to communicate or express and transmission through mediating variables is rendered impossible. Reciprocity—true engagement, listening, and response—is also rendered impossible. The destruction of reciprocity is thus a feature, not a bug, of contemporary mass culture; it is a mode of organization that turns public life into an arena of competing monologues rather than a space of exchange.

Real-world and historical examples of the tactical destruction of reciprocity might include:

Colonial Governance and the Destruction of Reciprocity – Examining how colonial powers disrupted existing social relations, replacing reciprocity with extractive, hierarchical systems. Example: The British colonial administration in India dismantling communal land ownership and reciprocity-based economies.

Slavery and Racial Capitalism – The ways in which racialized chattel slavery in the Americas destroyed reciprocity by converting human beings into fungible commodities, creating a system in which reciprocity was impossible by design.

The Holocaust and Bureaucratic Dehumanization – Nazi Germany’s systemic destruction of reciprocity through legal exclusion (Nuremberg Laws), forced labor, and the conversion of people into administrative “problems” to be solved.

Neoliberalism and the Financialization of Social Life – How late capitalism dissolves reciprocity by replacing collective obligations with market-driven individualism, e.g., the privatization of public goods and the gig economy’s erosion of stable social contracts.

Deinstitutionalization and the Withdrawal of Treatment – The closure of mental health facilities, leaving vulnerable populations to navigate hostile social conditions alone.

Mass Media and Algorithmic Governance – The role of media in shaping the conditions of speech and recognition, where discourse is structured around virality and outrage rather than reciprocity.

Genocide and the Banality of Evil

Browning’s work, and his argument that "evil arises out of ordinary thinking," is important here. The bureaucratic and cultural manifestations of violence are not the work of monstrous individuals alone, but of ordinary people who are normalized into systems of harm. Genocide, as Lower notes, is a social practice—a collective process that draws on the participation, whether active or passive, of an entire society. This observation doesn’t diminish the horror of those who perpetrate violence; rather, it highlights how evil is not always an act of extraordinary malevolence but the outcome of a deeply entrenched system that strips away the conditions for mutual recognition and solidarity.

The "outrageous banality of evil," as Arendt coined it, gives us a language to understand how violence can be normalized, routinized, and rendered invisible in the context of a larger social system. What we often think of as the perpetration of violence—the killing, the torture—is in fact just one moment in a long process of dehumanization, one moment in a social chain that begins long before and continues long after. The systemic forces, both hydraulic and nano, create the conditions for violence to unfold. What is chilling is not that individuals choose violence in the moment, but that they are embedded in a world where that violence feels like a reasonable course of action, where turning away from it becomes a matter of survival, self-preservation, or moral indifference.

The Mythic Human and the Subhuman

To return to the idea of the "mythic human"—this figure, which embodies the qualities and performances that society upholds as ideals, is the very structure upon which nano and hydraulic prejudices rest. The mythic human is the standard by which all others are judged and found wanting. The mythic human is healthy, able-bodied, wealthy, and racially privileged; they are active, productive, and possess what we recognize as the qualities of full humanity.

But for every mythic human, there is also the inhuman, the subhuman, the one who does not measure up. This division is not just a social reality; it is a conceptual one. The mythic human becomes the mirror in which everyone else is measured. To fail to live up to this myth is not just a personal failure; it is to risk being erased, to risk becoming a "killable object." Here, we see the perverse flip side of the myth of humanism: the myth that elevates some to humanity while casting others into non-being. Those who fall outside of this standard are treated as less-than-human, their deaths or suffering dismissed, ignored, or even justified.

The very possibility of a "mythic human" underpins all systems of exclusion, from colonialism to ableism to racism. It provides the logic for genocides like the Holocaust, the destruction of Indigenous peoples, the systemic violence against disabled bodies. It is a structure that exists in our institutions and our cultures, in our media and our rhetoric, always making the mythic human visible and the subhuman invisible.

The Power of Indifference

At the core of this entire system—this ecosystem of violence, exclusion, and indifference—is the numbing force of indifference itself. As Cornel West, Baldwin, and Wiesel all emphasize, indifference is not just the absence of empathy but the active erasure of others' humanity. It is the cornerstone of all violence, the silent partner to cruelty. The indifference we encounter in our social life—the refusal to acknowledge the suffering of others, the tacit acceptance of injustice—is not just a passive neglect. It is a complicity, a form of agreement that the lives of some are worth less than others, that some can be disposed of, erased, forgotten.

This indifference is embodied in both the hydraulic structures of law and policy and the nano structures of cultural norms and everyday practices. It is enacted in the decision to look away, to pretend that harm does not exist, or to justify harm as the natural order of things. And this indifference, in its most banal form, enables the genocidal logic that underpins the hydraulic and nano prejudices of modern societies.

Conclusion: The Inextricability of Life and Death

To end with the unsettling idea that not everyone is taken to be “living by default,” as you noted, is to confront the reality that in some worlds, life itself is not guaranteed. It is only recognized as life if it matches the ideal, the norm, the mythic human. To be alive but not recognized as living is the silent terror that runs through history, from the horrors of the Holocaust to the ongoing violence against marginalized groups today. It is the violence of being erased not in body but in recognition, in humanity.

Thus, the struggle against hydraulic and nano prejudice is not simply one of legal or social reform. It is a deeper struggle, a battle for the very conditions of life itself. It is a struggle to make the world legible, to make the lives of others visible and worthy recipients and givers of gifts and recognition. This aligns with Marcel Mauss’s ideas, particularly his work The Gift (Essai sur le don). Mauss argued that exchange is not merely economic but embedded in social, moral, and even spiritual dimensions, forming the basis of social cohesion. It resonates with Mauss’s notion that gift exchange is not just about material transactions but about the formation of personhood and the fabric of social life. It recalls his concern with the ethical and social consequences of alienation—when the moral economy of reciprocal exchange that constitutes social being is disrupted, it can lead to fragmentation and dehumanization.

In this sense, the violence you describe is not simply a matter of genocidal regimes or overt acts of cruelty. It is the ongoing work of normalization, the task of socializing people into a world where some lives count, and others do not. It is a task we all participate in, whether we choose to or not, by the very ways in which we think, speak, and act. If we are to resist, we must first see the work we are already doing, the ways in which we are complicit in the destruction of life.