The Paradox of the Pyramids

There is a sentence each of us has uttered at least once, and which, in uttering it, felt like the height of realism: "There's nothing I can change on my own."

It sounds like an observation. It is in fact one of the most philosophically dense statements in existence — and one of the falsest. Because it contains, compressed into a handful of words, the entire mechanism by which the few have always governed the many.

A hundred thousand men and a stone

Let us begin with an image that has stayed with me for years: the men who built the pyramids. Tens of thousands of people, for decades, dragging blocks of two and a half tonnes under the desert sun, so that one single man could have a tomb befitting his divinity. They were a boundless multitude. Their overseers, a handful. If one morning they had simply decided — all together — to put down the ropes, no force on earth could have made them pick them up again. They never did. Why?

Before answering, an honesty owed: archaeology has dismantled the Hollywood myth of slaves in chains. Excavations in the workers' villages at Giza tell of conscripted and salaried labourers, fed, cared for, buried with honour beside the site. And this, note well, does not weaken the question: it radicalises it. Because it means that moving those stones did not even require the whip. Something far cheaper and more efficient sufficed: the conviction, shared by all, that this was the order of the world. The pharaoh was a god, the pyramid held the cosmos in balance, and dragging stones was simply what one does when born at that point of reality. They were not obeying a tyrant. They were obeying normality.

David Hume, two and a half centuries ago, caught the paradox in a page that ought to be taught before the alphabet: nothing, he writes in his Essays, is more surprising than the ease with which the many are governed by the few. Since force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. Every power, even the most despotic, rests exclusively on what the subjected believe.

How reality becomes "natural"

But how does one manufacture a belief powerful enough to make people drag stones for a lifetime without anyone laying down the rope? Twentieth-century sociology gave this process precise names.

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann called it reification: human institutions — hierarchies, obligations, borders — are social constructions, things we made; but by the second generation they are perceived as given things, objective, natural as gravity. The son of the Giza quarryman did not see a power relation: he saw the world. Pierre Bourdieu sharpened the concept further with the notion of doxa: the set of things that in a society are not even discussed, because they come before discussion — not the dominant opinion, but that which never even attains the status of opinion. The most perfect domination, he wrote, is not the one that wins the debate: it is the one that never appears on the agenda. And when the social order inscribes itself so deeply into bodies and expectations as to seem destiny, Bourdieu speaks of symbolic violence: a violence that need not be exercised, because the victim administers it upon herself.

Here is the first layer of the answer: the pyramid builders did not rebel because, in order to rebel, they would first have had to see their condition as a condition — that is, as something contingent, alterable, historical. And doxa exists precisely to prevent that step. One does not fight what one calls "life".

Helplessness is learned

There is then a second layer, and it is not philosophical but experimental. In the 1960s the psychologist Martin Seligman discovered a phenomenon he called learned helplessness. His experiments showed that an animal exposed to inescapable electric shocks, after a certain number of failed attempts to avoid them, stops trying — and goes on not trying even when the escape route is opened. It stays there, enduring a now avoidable pain, because it has learned a lesson deeper than the pain itself: that its actions have no effect on the world.

Human beings, in later studies, showed the same pattern, with an aggravating factor: we not only learn helplessness, we transmit it. We tell it to our children as wisdom ("that's how the world works"), we codify it in proverbs, we elevate it to maturity. "There's nothing I can change on my own" is not an observation about reality: it is the symptom of a learning. We are animals that stopped jumping the barrier, and that built a philosophy to explain why the barrier is insurmountable — while the barrier, meanwhile, was removed long ago.

The best-kept secret: the others think as you do

But the most elegant mechanism is the third, and it concerns precisely the "on my own". The economist Mancur Olson formally demonstrated what every power knows by instinct: collective action is costly for the individual and its benefits go to everyone, so for each person it is individually rational to wait for the others to begin. Result: nobody begins, and a hundred thousand people stay motionless not because they are weak, but because they are uncoordinated.

Timur Kuran added the decisive piece with the concept of preference falsification: in oppressive systems — but also in merely conformist ones — people hide what they really think and display in public their adherence to the existing order. The consequence is lethal: each person sees around them a crowd of convinced conformists, and concludes they are alone. Dissent is the majority, but a majority in which every member believes himself a minority of one.

The dissident's solitude is not a fact: it is an optical illusion produced by the system — and at the same time its principal security technology. Hannah Arendt put it lapidarily: power never belongs to an individual, it arises only when men act in concert; which is why every domination has as its first objective not repression, but isolation.

And here the "there's nothing I can do on my own" reveals its nature: it is true by definition, and precisely for that reason irrelevant. Of course you change nothing on your own — no one, ever, in history, has changed anything alone, not even the pharaohs. The real question is not what the individual can do, but what prevents individuals from discovering themselves a multitude. And the answer, from Giza to today, is always the same: the belief, cultivated in each, that the others will not be there.

Havel's greengrocer and Graeber's stones

Václav Havel, in The Power of the Powerless, told the parable of the greengrocer who every morning places in his window the sign "Workers of the world, unite!". He does not believe it; nor does anyone who reads it; nor, perhaps, does the regime. But the sign is not there to communicate: it is there to signal obedience, and above all to show all the other greengrocers that obedience is universal. Each sign displayed makes it more costly, for the neighbour, not to display one. Until one day one man — a single one — takes it down. And Havel notes the extraordinary thing: that minuscule gesture is perceived by the system as an existential threat. Because it does not break a rule: it breaks the illusion of unanimity. It reveals that the emperor is naked, and that everyone already knew.

The revolutions of 1989 — which caught every expert by surprise — worked exactly like this: threshold cascades, to use the models of Granovetter and Kuran, in which each sign removed lowered the cost of removing the next, until in a few weeks what had seemed eternal collapsed. It had not become fragile all of a sudden: it had always been fragile. It was made of opinion, as Hume says. Only now the opinion was visible.

The anthropologist David Graeber condensed all this into what he called the ultimate hidden truth of the world: the world is something we make — and could just as easily make differently. This is not motivational exhortation: it is an anthropological fact. Every pyramid, every empire, every hierarchy that crushes us is held up, every single day, by billions of microscopic acts of reproduction: signs displayed, ropes picked back up, phrases like "that's how the world works" repeated to our children. The system has no other foundations. We are the foundations.

The rope in hand

I do not want to close with cheap optimism, which is only learned helplessness with a smile. The truth is that almost always the ropes are picked back up, the signs stay in the window, and the pyramids get finished. Doxa is powerful, isolation works, and history is full of entire generations who lived and died inside a normality that today appears monstrous to us — as ours, in all probability, will appear monstrous to those who come after.

But this is precisely the point the sentence "there's nothing I can change on my own" refuses to see: those generations were not powerless. They were unaware that they were not. Their condition was not destiny: it was an equilibrium — an equilibrium of beliefs, maintained by each for all. And equilibria, unlike destinies, have a marvellous and terrible property: they hold for centuries, and collapse in an afternoon.

None of us, alone, can change the world. But no world has ever been changed by anything other than us.