‘The lazy fucks had better have finished cleaning the shoes I want to wear out tonight’, Carol thought to herself as she stretched in bed and let out a sigh. She had given the task of cleaning her black pumps to the community of Mants that shared her sprawling and opulently appointed house earlier that day; she smiled as she remembered how she had worn them out partying the night before, and her bare feet and polished toes must have left them in quite a state. For fun she had demanded that the cleaning team of sixty-or so tiny men have their hands cuffed behind their backs, and to clean the shiny black shoes with nothing more than their tongues. She was a master of creative cruelty, her twisted amusements bringing her such delight.

Carol lived a life entirely supported by an economic system violent with inequality. Women like herself, were at the top; they had no need to work or take care of themselves in any conventional way. They wanted for absolutely nothing and had no concept of rarity. A sub-civilization of Mants, now numbering in the trillions, labored to provide food, resources, luxury, entertainment, innovation, and pleasure. Carol had only ever known this system, and any alternative was literally unthinkable to her. She, and all other women like her, saw herself as a living goddess to be worshipped by her staff of thousands of bug-people. It was the natural way of the universe, that there were to be haves, and have-nots... and she had.

History of course, is rife with examples of democratic masses overthrowing the elite few. American independence, the fight against slavery and for civil rights, the European revolutions against their monarchies. Over human history, there are ten-thousand examples of a poor people repressed until an uprising resets matters to a new status quo. The pampered elites, insulated from reality with their money, land, castles, and food would find themselves suddenly burst from their bubble and more often than not executed by mobs driven to violence through starvation or outrage. No matter how unequal or unfair a country or system became, there was always the escape valve of civil unrest. The elite - the kings and queens, the oligarchs and heiresses - by their nature were outnumbered many times over by the proles, and so although injustice by the haves upon the have-nots was common, there were dramatic avenues of retaliation that could turn the societal tables. 

Until the process of Reduction was developed. 

A quantum miracle whereby a person may be swiftly reduced to just a few millimeters in size, Reduction changed the world. At first used as an efficient punishment for criminal offenders, it later was used to staff assembly lines, reduced workers being much more able to work with finesse at tiny scales, not to mention so cheap to employ and feed that they may as well be free. And soon whole communities of reduced persons, or Mants as they would become derogatorily known, came to exist. It became more and more expensive to live a non-reduced life, pressure to become reduced grew and political changes began to reserve the right to be normal sized to those who were rich and powerful. At some point, rare genetic effects became apparent such that those people bearing them were not readily susceptible to the Reduction process, these people were genetically guaranteed a permanent membership of the emerging superclass of normal-sized people. Winning this genetic lottery coincided strongly with the presence of two X-chromosomes, slowly leading the world to be increasingly dominated by women. Never in history has a more powerful collective lived peacefully alongside weaker cousins; humans - both men and women - are driven to take, to own, to drive anyone or anything weaker than them slowly, grindingly, into the dirt.

And so again dawned a human era of elite oppression over less-fortunate masses; where the rich exploited and effectively enslaved the Mants to provide them with embarrassing luxury. Except this time, there could be no unrest or collective action that could rectify the injustice. The five-thousand Mants that worked in Carol’s home could all rise up in protest at once and yet still could not effect any change. How could they protest their living standards when Carol can lift her toe and crush thirty slowly beneath it, when a crowd of a thousand can be slaughtered in seconds beneath a pair of her boots. Or even worse: be tortured in the most barbaric and inhuman ways, as one might pull the wings slowly off a bug. All of this done with the full blessing of the state, with no law to support Mant rights, they do not exist. Instead the law gives Carol ultimate jurisdiction in her home, which she uses to terrorize and dominate the Mant workers. 
This current inequality, of goddesses like Carol demanding ever greater hardships for their pleasure from the wretched oppressed Mants, has no end, there is no appeal, no possible uprising, no hope. The Mants are born into a hopeless slavery, their tiny bodies to be exhausted by the capricious and greedy whims of the invincible titanic goddesses that own them. 

And Carol loved it. She loved the feeling of superiority she got just comparing herself to the poor bugs. She liked stepping down hard just in front of a group of Mants scurrying to their assigned tasks somewhere in the house, to glance down and see their shell-shocked reactions as a ten-thousand ton foot and shoe lands like a bomb inches from their fragile bodies. Seeing them grovel at her toes, or to watch a group of them to lick her shoes clean with their tongues, desperate to please her, sent shivers through her body, it made her hot with self-importance and status. She fucking loved it.