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This reminds me of a poem by Berthold Brecht: Questions From A Worker Who Reads Who built Thebes of the seven gates? In the books you will find th

This reminds me of a poem by Berthold Brecht: Questions From A Worker Who Reads Who built Thebes of the seven gates? In the books you will find the names of kings. Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock? And Babylon, many times demolished Who raised it up so many times? In what houses of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live? Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished Did the masons go? Great Rome Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whom Did the Caesars triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in song Only palaces for its inhabitans? Even in fabled Atlantis The night the ocean engulfed it The drowning still bawled for their slaves. The young Alexander conquered India. Was he alone? Caesar beat the Gauls. Did he not have even a cook with him? Philip of Spain wept when his armada Went down. Was he the only one to weep? Frederick the Second won the Seven Year's War. Who Else won it? Every page a victory. Who cooked the feast for the victors? Every ten years a great man? Who paid the bill? So many reports. So many questions.

gherkinnn 5y ago
I'm torn. Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India. Same foot soldiers. Same cooks. But it was Alexander who got them there. And yet we loose so much by glossing over the cooks and masons and smiths and horsemen. Stories lost. Lives lost. Knowledge lost. It's been a mere 70 years and the logistics that went in to D-Day are never talked about. It's all cliffs, Private Ryan, and Eisenhower. They put 150,000 men across the channel in a single day. And nobody seems to know about the how. Original poem: https://lyricstranslate.com/en/bertolt-brecht-fragen-eines-lesenden-arbeiters-lyrics.html https://lyricstranslate.com/en/bertolt-brecht-fragen-eines-l... In Our Time on Persepolis, with a rather critical take on Alexander (the Great | of Macedon): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b4z075 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b4z075. 13 Minutes to the Moon, a BBC production about the moon landing. A good amount of detail about the invisible work that went in to the spectacular feat: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xttx2 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xttx2
- guerrilla 5y ago
  > Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India How do you know that? Leadership and management are real jobs but there's often existing demand, goals and plans that these people are employed by those around them for. I'm willing to go out on a limb and wager that's the way it always is actually. Everyone's a product of their environment and their times, standing on the shoulder of giants, workers and peasants alike.
  - gherkinnn 5y ago
    I don't. And you're right as in his exploits did not happen in a vacuum. A pervasive theme is that time rumbles by and great men merely cling on and go with it at the right time. The Greeks were in the mood for a rampage and off they went. An Alexander born today won't start conquering foreign lands. And yet, I can't shake the feeling that there must me something unique to Alexander and others. Time passes, but not everybody massages it just enough to make a change.
  - api 5y ago
    There are some great recent counterexamples to this. Here are two: when Steve Jobs took the helm of Apple in the early 2000s, and Elon Musk with reusable rockets and rebooting space in general. We seem wired to rally around leaders to get things done. Most people seem to wait around to be told what to do. This makes modern people very uncomfortable (for some very rational reasons) to the point that we engage in denialism about it. In ancient tribal societies with group sizes close to Dunbar's number, this probably worked out much better than it does now. People had direct relationships with the leader and could see clearly what was happening, and if a leader lost favor they had to face people directly. Sometimes the results were brutal. In modern society we have systems so large with so many layers of social and economic abstraction that it's very easy for leaders to abuse their power and to hide that abuse for a long time. It's also very easy for leaders to lose sight of the "ground truth" and/or for the people to lose sight of what the leader is doing. I'm sure sometimes leaders don't set out to abuse their power but kind of "back into it" for various reasons. It gets pretty dysfunctional but when you think about it it's kind of astounding that we are able to scale at all to societies this large given our species' background. Edit: I also wonder if there's an ego protecting mechanism at work. When Elon Musk says he's going to build a reusable rocket, we can get behind him and work for him... but if the effort fails we can blame the whole thing on him. If we succeed the leader gets the credit, which is the part we hate, but if we fail the leader also gets the blame.
C19is20 5y ago
The Egg, by Andy Weir.
kerneloftruth 5y ago
Which reminds me of a quote from Agatha Christie's "Death on the Nile": “Take the Pyramids. Great blocks of useless masonry, put up to minister to the egoism of a despotic bloated king. Think of the sweated masses who toiled to build them and died doing it. It makes me sick to think of the suffering and torture they represent." Mrs. Allerton said cheerfully: "You’d rather have no Pyramids, no Parthenon, no beautiful tombs or temples—just the solid satisfaction of knowing that people got three meals a day and died in their beds." The young man directed his scowl in her direction. "I think human beings matter more than stones.”
deepsun 5y ago
Modern: Elon Musk builds the best rockets, and cool cars. Linus Torvalds created GNU/Linux. (Well he corrected on several occasions that he did not built Linux, he only started it). Higgs discovered Higgs boson. Einstein created Theory of Relativity. Putin attacked Ukraine.
nineplay 5y ago
Alexander did not 'conquer' India, and it's a pity this gets repeated so often. > His army, exhausted, homesick, and anxious by the prospects of having to further face large Indian armies throughout the Indo-Gangetic Plain, mutinied at the Hyphasis (modern Beas River) and refused to march further east. Alexander, after a meeting with his officer, Coenus, and after hearing about the lament of his soldiers,[5] eventually relented,[6] being convinced that it was better to return. The history of India is rarely covered at all in the Western world, and the most often repeated summary of Alexander's campaign is the "no more worlds to conquer" bit from Die Hard which is a misquote of English poets. The English view of India is not unbiased. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_campaign_of_Alexander_the_Great https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_campaign_of_Alexander_t...
- 8bitsrule 5y ago
  Alexander was Great at murder.

gherkinnn 5y ago

I'm torn. Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India. Same foot soldiers. Same cooks. But it was Alexander who got them there. And yet we loose so much by glossing over the cooks and masons and smiths and horsemen. Stories lost. Lives lost. Knowledge lost. It's been a mere 70 years and the logistics that went in to D-Day are never talked about. It's all cliffs, Private Ryan, and Eisenhower. They put 150,000 men across the channel in a single day. And nobody seems to know about the how. Original poem: https://lyricstranslate.com/en/bertolt-brecht-fragen-eines-lesenden-arbeiters-lyrics.html https://lyricstranslate.com/en/bertolt-brecht-fragen-eines-l... In Our Time on Persepolis, with a rather critical take on Alexander (the Great | of Macedon): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b4z075 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b4z075. 13 Minutes to the Moon, a BBC production about the moon landing. A good amount of detail about the invisible work that went in to the spectacular feat: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xttx2 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xttx2

guerrilla 5y ago
> Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India How do you know that? Leadership and management are real jobs but there's often existing demand, goals and plans that these people are employed by those around them for. I'm willing to go out on a limb and wager that's the way it always is actually. Everyone's a product of their environment and their times, standing on the shoulder of giants, workers and peasants alike.
- gherkinnn 5y ago
  I don't. And you're right as in his exploits did not happen in a vacuum. A pervasive theme is that time rumbles by and great men merely cling on and go with it at the right time. The Greeks were in the mood for a rampage and off they went. An Alexander born today won't start conquering foreign lands. And yet, I can't shake the feeling that there must me something unique to Alexander and others. Time passes, but not everybody massages it just enough to make a change.
- api 5y ago
  There are some great recent counterexamples to this. Here are two: when Steve Jobs took the helm of Apple in the early 2000s, and Elon Musk with reusable rockets and rebooting space in general. We seem wired to rally around leaders to get things done. Most people seem to wait around to be told what to do. This makes modern people very uncomfortable (for some very rational reasons) to the point that we engage in denialism about it. In ancient tribal societies with group sizes close to Dunbar's number, this probably worked out much better than it does now. People had direct relationships with the leader and could see clearly what was happening, and if a leader lost favor they had to face people directly. Sometimes the results were brutal. In modern society we have systems so large with so many layers of social and economic abstraction that it's very easy for leaders to abuse their power and to hide that abuse for a long time. It's also very easy for leaders to lose sight of the "ground truth" and/or for the people to lose sight of what the leader is doing. I'm sure sometimes leaders don't set out to abuse their power but kind of "back into it" for various reasons. It gets pretty dysfunctional but when you think about it it's kind of astounding that we are able to scale at all to societies this large given our species' background. Edit: I also wonder if there's an ego protecting mechanism at work. When Elon Musk says he's going to build a reusable rocket, we can get behind him and work for him... but if the effort fails we can blame the whole thing on him. If we succeed the leader gets the credit, which is the part we hate, but if we fail the leader also gets the blame.

C19is20 5y ago

The Egg, by Andy Weir.

kerneloftruth 5y ago

Which reminds me of a quote from Agatha Christie's "Death on the Nile": “Take the Pyramids. Great blocks of useless masonry, put up to minister to the egoism of a despotic bloated king. Think of the sweated masses who toiled to build them and died doing it. It makes me sick to think of the suffering and torture they represent." Mrs. Allerton said cheerfully: "You’d rather have no Pyramids, no Parthenon, no beautiful tombs or temples—just the solid satisfaction of knowing that people got three meals a day and died in their beds." The young man directed his scowl in her direction. "I think human beings matter more than stones.”

deepsun 5y ago

Modern: Elon Musk builds the best rockets, and cool cars. Linus Torvalds created GNU/Linux. (Well he corrected on several occasions that he did not built Linux, he only started it). Higgs discovered Higgs boson. Einstein created Theory of Relativity. Putin attacked Ukraine.

nineplay 5y ago

Alexander did not 'conquer' India, and it's a pity this gets repeated so often. > His army, exhausted, homesick, and anxious by the prospects of having to further face large Indian armies throughout the Indo-Gangetic Plain, mutinied at the Hyphasis (modern Beas River) and refused to march further east. Alexander, after a meeting with his officer, Coenus, and after hearing about the lament of his soldiers,[5] eventually relented,[6] being convinced that it was better to return. The history of India is rarely covered at all in the Western world, and the most often repeated summary of Alexander's campaign is the "no more worlds to conquer" bit from Die Hard which is a misquote of English poets. The English view of India is not unbiased. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_campaign_of_Alexander_the_Great https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_campaign_of_Alexander_t...

8bitsrule 5y ago
Alexander was Great at murder.