Through his decrees and orders, as we discussed a couple of lectures ago, the Egyptian pharaoh endeavored to change ancient Egyptian culture. He banned polytheism and instated a monotheistic religion built around a single supreme deity, the solar disc, as the great life giving force. He actually did much more as well. For example, he changed the artistic style to a more naturalistic representation as in this depiction of his own family. They're shown here sipping from chalices. Previously, the stylized depictions had been of the Gods. Not of daily family scenes. He also introduce a new type of building construction utilizing smaller bricks. The Egyptian empire can be looked at as one great huge team. Much the way we talked about nations as teams under certain circumstances, such as war. And the leader in the Egyptian case was the Pharoah or King. As Pharaoh, Akhenaten, had the power to circulate new decrees, new metaculture. And we'll talk in it later lecture about what kind of force produces the power. Despite the huge scale of this team, and of these changes, the forces have worked on the motion of cultural, are really the same as those we discussed in the case of driving, and the particular side of the road. Let me show that by taking the same diagram we use on that context, but substituting for the specific components that we had in that diagram, the Egyptian case. The traditional culture in this case specifically the traditional religion has been in motion. Therefore, by the principle we articulated earlier it's going to tend the stay in motion. That is people will tend to continue worshipping the old gods in the same way. That's indicated on the diagram by the lower Eros. However, Akhenaten has able to issued decrease and statements whose purpose is to change the religion. The decrees, orders, statements, and the like, form part of a separate layer of culture, what I have been calling reflective culture, or metaculture. Their motion is represented in the diagram by the uppermost left to right arrows, but the reflective culture is also about the traditional culture. It is a command, so to speak, to change that traditional culture and create a new one, getting rid of the pantheon of deities and replacing it with a solar disk as the sole deity. The purpose of that reflective culture, therefore, is to exercise a force on the motion of traditional culture. Just as I had used my learned thoughts to guide myself through turns in New Zealand, rather than relying on my old habits and past practices. Some of the Egyptian people had to receive these new thoughts and endeavors to implement them in their everyday conduct. I'm depicting only the religious aspect of culture, but there were many other aspects as well. Now I want to add to this account a crucial fact about the movement of culture. It's really important to grasp this when it comes to teams. The motion of the habitual inertial culture exercises a counterforce to the metacultural force, it in effect resists the change. If you've seen the movie Wayne's World you might remember Garth's line, we fear change. It's not necessarily the case that people actually do fear change, maybe they do. Rather it is the tendency of culture already flowing through the world to continue following at the same rate of interaction. Let me try to illustrate this with a slight modification of my previous diagram. I've added the little solid block vertical arrow coming up from ancient Egyptians in the center of the diagram. It represents the force of resistance to the metacultural force coming down, that's stimulating the change. This is crucial to what happens to teams over time, as we'll see. But let's end this lecture with a picture of a cast of head of [INAUDIBLE] the great culture transformer of ancient Egypt. It's a picture I took in the museum just a little while ago.
