PharaohsIt took Khufu twenty-three years to build his Great Pyramid at Giza, where some eleven hundred stone blocks, each weighing about two and a half tons, had to be quarried, moved, and set in place every day during the annual building season, roughly four months long. Few commentators on these facts can resist noting that this achievement is an amazing testimonial to the pharaohs iron control over the workers of Egypt. I submit, on the contrary, that pharaoh Khufu needed to exercise no more control over his workers at Giza than pharaoh Bill Gates exercises over his workers at Microsoft. I submit that Egyptian workers, relatively speaking, got as much out of building Khufus pyramid as Microsoft workers will get out of building Bill Gatess pyramid (which will surely dwarf Khufus a hundred times over, though it will not, of course, be built of stone).No special control is needed to make people into pyramid buildersif they see themselves as having no choice but to build pyramids. Theyll build whatever theyre told to build, whether its pyramids, parking garages, or computer programs.Karl Marx recognized that workers without a choice are workers in chains. But his idea of breaking chains was for us to depose the pharaohs and then build the pyramids for ourselves, as if building pyramids is something we just cant stop doing, we love it so much.
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About Daniel Quinn
Daniel Quinn was a 20th-century American author. Daniel Clarence Quinn was an American author, cultural critic, and publisher of educational texts, best known for his novel Ishmael, which won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991 and was published the following year. Quinn's ideas are popularly associated with environmentalism, though he criticized this term for portraying the environment as separate from human life, thus creating a false dichotomy, and the environmental movement as misguided and ultimately ineffective. Read more on Wikipedia →