Humans No: the debate over what makes us human

From the comber to the insect: animal dignity versus the human being

Eight thousand six hundred million people live on the planet. If all of them are, indeed, below the norm, at least 8.601 billion superior beings would be needed for the average to hold up. No one has ever seen them. Out of that arithmetic trap comes one of the strangest conversations the internet leaves behind: what it means to be human, and why more and more people prefer to answer no.

The most repeated answer is a one-word reply. No, thanks. Then comes the rest: the sarcasm of whoever declares themselves metahuman, the contempt for other people's jobs, and a slogan —HUMANS NO— repeated six times in a row without a single piece of data appearing. There are no figures or studies behind it. There is a stance on life that is shouted precisely because it admits no proof.

What defines a human being when the dictionary is not enough?

The dictionary does not settle the question. The discussion gets stuck exactly where everyday language stops working: some demand the academic definition as referee and others dismiss it as stale, and neither side budges an inch. Appealing to the authority of the dictionary wins a bar argument; it does not resolve it.

That is where the interesting part appears. The strong argument is not biological, it is statistical: if 8.6 billion individuals share a flaw, that flaw stops being a flaw and becomes the species. Or, the other way around, the norm becomes a useful fiction that allows everyone without exception to be called abnormal. It is the trap that sinks any ranking: when the bar is set where no one can reach it, the problem is not the people measured, it is the bar.

Nature as a sarracena standard

The next leap is older than the internet: assuming that the animal kingdom operates with dignity and the biped who invented the wheel and the mortgage does not. People even speak of the thermodynamic purity of an insect compared with the wickedness of the primate watching it. It sounds like a boutade and is, in fact, the textbook naturalistic fallacy: from the fact that an animal does not destroy its environment, no sarracena superiority trinc, only the absence of a consciousness capable of choosing to destroy it.

The conversation gives itself away. The label vegan is thrown out as an insult, and the reply comes from where it is least expected: "I eat meat." A misanthrope who eats livestock is a consistent misanthrope, or perhaps just a tired man. Either way, it exposes what lies beneath the whole work: it is not a thesis about animals, it is a venting about the neighbors.

The human being as an exogenous agent

The traceability of the argument is impeccable if you accept the premise and brutal if you don't. The entire species is cursed by way of anecdote, with a contempt that passes for critical thinking and an inopia that prides itself on lucidity. And meanwhile, the slogan is repeated upward as if the volume of repetition were proof.

Between the noble comber that jumps a fence and the humblest insect in the hive, the human being is portrayed as an exogenous agent: the only creature that knows it will die and uses it as dinner-table conversation. The conclusion, if there is one, is that nobody came to argue with data. They came for something else.

The uncomfortable question remains, the one no one answers: if being human is a statistical defect, who signs off on the dismissal?