One Piece and the repetition of a small crowd
“No dan marcha atrás. Una y otra vez, vuelven. La rabia le ha ganado al miedo.” A political scientist1 offered this phrase to describe recent youth protests in Lima. It has the cadence of an epic, but epics are for winners. Here, what we see is repetition.
Spinoza reminds us: governments lean on hope and fear. People obey as long as fear outweighs their other passions. When fear weakens, obedience falters. That explains why a handful of youngsters return to the streets despite police batons. Their fear is gone, their rage intact.
But rage is not emancipation. For Spinoza, rage is a sad passion—not because it is immoral, but because it binds action to an external cause. Rage always points outward: to the enemy, the ruler, the police. It moves bodies, but only in relation to what they oppose. The “victory” of rage over fear is not freedom; it is another form of servitude.
The so-called Generation Z is in fact a small cohort, not an entire generation. Their visibility comes from symbols—like the One Piece pirate flag—that translate rage into recognizable images. Thus, a pirate flag from One Piece becomes the emblem of resistance. Symbols matter more than numbers; media converts cosplay into politics. The result is visibility without volume. A minor crowd, amplified by media, becomes a spectacle. But spectacle is not scale.
Here lies the trap: adults with clear political goals exploit the noise. For them, youth rage is a convenient soundtrack for weakening Boluarte. It is energy without a program, and therefore easy to redirect. Pundits romanticize it as “a new wave,” while politicians calculate how to spend it.
Peru’s political life is not about stability or its absence. It is about the circulation of affects: fear today, rage tomorrow, hope the day after. Presidents fall not because “institutions fail” but because no passion secures their endurance. Accountability is constant; permanence is rare. Nothing tragic about it—just another form of movement.
To say “rage has beaten fear” is to name a moment, not a destiny. Rage does not found, fear does not dissolve, hope does not redeem. They alternate, overlap, cancel, return. The crowd returns too, as long as the affect remains.
That is the real lesson: not epic victory, not teleology, not decline. Only the oscillation of passions, repeated “una y otra vez,” in a country where every government is temporary and every crowd is smaller than it imagines. So “the repetition of a small crowd” means the cyclical return of a minor group whose rage animates visibility but not transformation — a loop of passion mistaken for revolution.