Thoreau on the Pyramids: For Whom Are You Working?
Although Henry David Thoreau is often classified as a transcendentalist and as a rugged individualist, Thoreau is also one of the great American champions of liberty and self-determination. In his book Walden; Or, Life in the Woods, Thoreau not only discusses his experiences living and sustaining himself along the shores of Walden Pond, but he also weaves together various threads of Western culture and history in parts of his thought that don’t get much attention in popular discussions of Walden.
Many of us today are workers, precious few are managers, and even fewer are owners. This is no less true in our time as it was in Thoreau’s, and no less true in Thoreau’s than it was in ancient times, as Thoreau so succinctly and colorfully put it in Walden:
As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs. (Thoreau, Walden, Architecture)
Are any of us today really that different from the pyramid-builders of old? Except now we slave away not under the desert sun but at our office desks and computer screens for corporate overlords who care just as little about the fates of their workers as the Egyptian pharaohs did for theirs.
Is climbing the corporate ladder akin to breaking one’s back building the pyramids of Ancient Egypt?
We fancy ourselves to be ever so much more civilized and enlightened than people of the ancient world, both peasants and pharaohs alike. Yet we are willing to sacrifice just as much of our individual freedom, self-determination, and autonomy as laborers raising the stones above the Giza Plateau—with end results that are significantly shorter-lived to show for it. At least the Pyramids of Giza have lasted for thousands of years as testaments to the lives wasted building them!
Could the collective workforce of pyramid-builders really have drowned their pharaoh and their taskmasters in the Nile? Absolutely. Even if they didn’t have the ability to conceive of a more enlightened form of government or of a different way of life, undoubtedly the end result would have been better than breaking their collective backs in the name of some snazzy-dressing Egyptian guy. (At least the pharaohs of Ancient Egypt got to have some pretty badass golden death masks when they die. Members of our ruling class may still have snazzy clothes, but don’t look nearly as cool going into their final resting places!)
Our corporate overlords may be snazzy dressers, but they don’t get a badass golden death mask like this when they die!
Why do we endure our digital and corporate slavery any more than the Egyptians endured their literal one? While we obviously aren’t empowered to drown our corporate overlords in the river any more than the Egyptian slaves felt empowered to do so to their masters in the Nile, all too often we sacrifice the bulk of our useful lives to our corporate taskmasters just the same. But for the sake of what? Money? Security? A pat on the back and a gold watch after 30 years? Even the days of 30 years and a gold watch are long since gone! A corporate holiday card and a Christmas bonus? The whole notion of Christmas bonus as seen in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation is already charmingly anachronistic, at least for us 21-st century digital pyramid-builders today.
Some of us are arguably better off than workers of old, at least from a Marxian standpoint, as many of us are working on projects that we do actually care about and in which we are fully and authentically invested. But we still sacrifice so much of our lives and our day-to-day freedom nonetheless. And for what? To sell a few more apps? To gain a few more website subscribers or Twitter followers? To line the pockets of our venture capitalists and our angel investors? Are your own freedom and your own short lifetime really worth so little to you?—to say nothing of your personal dignity.
Working for a startup can be more fun and more authentic than working for corporate overlords. But is the loss of freedom any more worth it for a startup than it was for there Egyptian pyramid-builders?
As a former employee of a small, awesome-to-work-for educational technology startup, which was subsequently destroyed by a relatively evil parent company with less-than-pure motives, I can’t help but think how much wiser we all would have been to collectively walk away from the evil parent company and continue doing the work that we loved doing, but on our own terms and with our autonomy and our self-respect intact. It would have been much more dignified of us, to use Thoreau’s terminology, than to sit idly by watching colleague after colleague get laid off and to see the subsequent systematic dismantling of everything we had built.
At least the pyramids still stand, which is better than most of our corporate creations will have fared in a few thousand years!
Again, at least the Egyptian pyramids still stand. The pyramid-builders didn’t have to stand by and watch in aghast silence while their greatest edifices and achievements were torn down before their own eyes by the very masters for whom they toiled. Yet this is what happens in corporate America every day, to workers who hand over their lives, their liberty, and their finest creations to corporate masters who don’t give a tinker’s dam about the products they sell or the people who make them, just the profits they never intend to share.
And, when all is said and done, at the end of the workday or at the end of our all-too-short human lives, were those creations we slaved away to make, the pyramids of yesterday or our corporate edifices of today, really worth the loss of freedom and autonomy—theirs or ours—in the first place?
Probably not.
For Further Reading:
Walden; Or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
