Pharaoh is glad to see his slaves sitting on their bums and discussing the meaning of freedom. He knows that they will continue to sit in the same place. And sooner or later, as hunger grips them, they will get off their bums and begin page 395 hoisting blocks of stone again. Otherwise they won’t get their kai and shelter.

Militancy is to actually do something different.

If the slaves use drugs, this is still to Pharaoh’s benefit. He won’t ever arrest the big men who import drugs illegally. They are his cousins. He’ll arrest the small men, because they are slaves. Others will step into the shoes of the ones who are arrested.

Drugs may weaken the health of the slaves. But Pharaoh prefers the confused militancy of drug-using to the lucid militancy of the man who recognises Pharaoh as a non-friend.

The mania of a man who wants heroin is not so different from that of a man whose sanity is money. He is tied to the pyramids by his need for the money.

The payment of money for work does not in itself mean slavery. A man can sell his work without selling himself. Each worker gets two wages – money from the boss and the inner joy which is the wage God pays him. By slavery the boss robs him of this inner joy. The joy does not go to the boss. It goes back to God and becomes a cloud of vengeance.

The cloud of great darkness that hangs over Egypt is there because Pharaoh is depriving his slaves of the wage God intends them to have.

Starvation was not invented by Pharaoh. Before he existed, in times of famine many of the people starved. But starvation in the middle of great page 396 wealth is Pharaoh’s invention. He is content to let his worn-out slaves, or the ones whom he does not at the moment need, live on the edge of starvation. He wants a labour pool of strong slaves to keep the working slaves ready to obey him in all matters. Starvation has the added effect of making the old or married slave feel that he is worthless. The greatest humiliation is that he is unable to support his relatives.

Pharaoh can say, ‘Look, you are free to find work. But it is your stupidity and lack of talents that keeps you out of work.’ He does not tell them openly that worthlessness and near-starvation are part of the invisible structure of his pyramids.

In Egypt, sex, like everything else, is a commodity. From time to time Pharaoh organises a drive against prostitution and pornography. But this is absurd. In the slave market a woman will get a job more readily if she agrees to sleep with her boss. Pornography is a Martian room of mirrors for Pharaoh’s cousins. A girl who strips for all comers is selling her body for money. Avarice, not lust, is the root cause of pornography.

Prostitution and pornography are a standard fact of Pharaoh’s kingdom. Among free people they cease to exist, because the poor do not regard persons as property.

The indirect effect of prostitution and pornography is to castrate both men and women by robbing their sexuality of meaning. A castrated slave has lost half of his will to exist. The publishers of pornography are buttresses of Pharaoh’s kingdom.

God made the land and the people. He gave the land to the people to be their mother, to feed them and to heal their wounded spirits. Men can’t own what they have not made. But Pharaoh drives a wedge between the land and the people, calling the first ‘agricultural units’ and the second ‘a labour force’.

The humiliated voice of the people is the voice of God. But it is not heard in the schools and universities. You have to put your ear close to the ground to hear it.