The Effing Elites … Again … Still

I have been watching a number of documentaries of late about ancient Egyptian societies, which have fascinated me since I was a boy. Egyptian kings were considered gods, at least having one foot in godhood status. I don’t know if they invented the “god-king” concept but they were, at least, an early adopter.

One has to ask, why did the vast majority of the population give so much power to these people? Clearly the power was usurped by two means: force and religion. So-called kings who were just battle leaders kind of liked being able to order people around and so extended their hegemony into peace time, their loyal soldiers becoming “palace guards.” In many other cases, shamans or other “holy men” saw protection and a meal ticket by running interference for the powerful secular leaders and so made a marriage made in heaven, literally. The Secular-Religious Axis was a joint powers agreement.

Apologists will respond with points like “religion supplies order and is a salve for the vicissitudes of daily life. Religion a salve? Not hardly. Take the word of Tony Castaldo who started reading the Bible as a pre-teen: “And by the time I finished “Numbers”, I did understand God — I understood that God was a superhero story, like Superman or Spiderman, just one invented by brutal men that used violence and murder to subjugate women (so they could rape them at will with no repercussions) and children and slaves.”

Watching myriad Egyptian citizens (not slaves) muscling millions of stone blocks into the shape of a pyramid (two and a half million blocks in just the Great Pyramid, weighing approximately six million tons) over decades requires me to ask about the opportunity costs. What would those tens of thousands of healthy workers been able to do had they not been “assigned” stone carrying duties? Economists explain that whenever you tackle any task, you incur and “opportunity cost” in the form of giving up on what you could do on another task. And archaeologists have identified over 118 to 138 distinct pyramids in Egypt.

And who ordered these to be built? The Egyptian Kings, of course. And, then there are the grandiose temples (e.g. Karnak, Luxor, Abu Simbel, Edfu, Dendera, Hatshepsut, and Ramesseum and thousands of “lesser” temples) to be built for the priests, gotta keep them happy, too. (Google AI says, “These sites primarily served as homes for deities, built by pharaohs to showcase their devotion and power.” Exactly, vanity projects and political sops traded for priestly support.)

It is the Effing Elites who order such grotesque vanity projects, who decide to make war on neighbors, etc. What if instead, all of that labor and wealth were applied to controlling the flooding of the Nile? Or building affordable housing and providing affordable food and drink for ordinary Egyptians)? (I can hear the GOP caterwaulers screaming “Socialism!” already.)

If you then follow the history of the human race for the next 2000 years, you will see the same pattern, e.g. autocrats like Louis the Fourteenth, Mussolini, Hitler, and Trump with their grandiose building projects and wars at the drop of a hat.

So, why do we yield our power to these assholes? Especially when the U.S. was formed as the first nation “of the people, by the people, and for the people” and kings could go eff themselves.