Abstract
Superlatives - meaning peak performances, records, supposedly unsurpassable forms of uniqueness - have always existed, throughout human history as well as in nature. Humans, however, have - with continuity, greed, and ruthlessness - claimed for themselves the primacy of absolute singularity. Since the beginning of the third millennium, the era in which we currently live has been called the Anthropocene, in order to express how total human presence, dominance, and appropriation of the planet have become. The causes responsible for this, like its consequences, are multifactorial: the Industrial Revolution and global economic systems oriented toward constant profit maximization and limitless growth, have together led to a peak in the magnitude with which humans intervene in the Earth’s biological, geological, and atmospheric processes.
An overarching commonality among realistic alternatives to phenomena of superlatives can be found in the concept of deceleration - that is, a conscious turn toward the understanding that faster is not always better than slower, bigger not always better than smaller, accumulation not always better than reduction or letting go. This concept has been given an organized extension through the internationally active degrowth movement, for which the French philosopher Serge Latouche is one of the key reference figures.