The Pharaoh and the President: Power, Enclosure, and the War over Reality
What do an ancient Egyptian pharaoh and a modern American president have in common?
More than you might think.
Nearly 3,500 years ago, Pharaoh Akhenaten undertook one of the most radical reforms in Egyptian history: a sweeping religious revolution that centered worship on a single god—Aten, the sun disc—and declared that all other gods were false or obsolete. Akhenaten didn’t just change the official religion; he tried to redefine reality itself, dismantling the symbolic and institutional structures that had organized Egyptian life for centuries.
Fast forward to the 21st century, and we find ourselves watching a figure like Donald Trump attempt something uncannily similar—not in theology, but in media, institutions, and the symbolic life of a democracy. His political project has been less about changing policy than about monopolizing interpretation. Truth itself, in this new regime, is increasingly framed as something only he can deliver. Anything outside that channel? “Fake news.”
This isn’t just about power in the usual sense. It’s about enclosure.
What Is Enclosure?
In the history of land and law, enclosure refers to the fencing-off of common land, taking something that once belonged to many and making it the property of a few. But enclosure isn’t just something you do to land—it can also be done to meaning, to ritual, to language, even to reality itself.
In a broader framework we’re exploring (the Symbiotic Intelligence Framework, or SIF), we treat interpretation—the ability to make sense of the world—as something that is socially distributed. Meaning isn’t manufactured in the brain alone; it’s shaped in relationships, rituals, institutions, stories, and habits. Power, in this sense, isn’t just about force or law—it’s also about who gets to say what things mean.
Akhenaten: Enclosing the Divine
Before Akhenaten, Egypt had a sprawling pantheon of gods: Amun, Osiris, Hathor, Ptah, and many others. These gods had temples, priesthoods, regional festivals, and mythic roles embedded in everyday life. Religion was not centralized—it was participatory, layered, and locally embedded.
Akhenaten tried to change all that.
He abolished the old gods, built a new capital city, and declared that Aten was the only true god. More dramatically, only he—Akhenaten himself—could interpret or access Aten. The priesthoods were sidelined. The symbols of old belief systems were scrubbed from monuments. A new iconography appeared: rays of sunlight ending in hands, blessing the royal family.
This was not just a religious reform. It was an epistemic coup—a top-down redefinition of what counted as sacred, real, and true.
And yet… the god Bes—a squat, cheerful deity of childbirth, music, and household protection—never really went away. Even under official suppression, Egyptians still kept amulets of Bes, whispered his prayers, and painted his grin on the walls of their homes.
Trump: Enclosing the Real
In a very different setting, Trump has built his power not by offering a coherent ideology or governing vision, but by waging war on shared reality. Institutions that once offered multiple interpretive frameworks—science, journalism, law, education—have been systematically attacked or delegitimized. Loyalty is prized not for competence but for alignment with a singular interpretive frame.
In this view: – Only Trump can declare what’s real. – All others—journalists, experts, even courts—are liars or traitors. – Truth becomes person-bound, not process-bound.
He doesn’t need to suppress every opposing voice. He just needs to enclose belief—to narrow the trusted zone to a single source.
And yet, here too, there are limits. The household gods of modern life—meme culture, satire, community organizing, independent media, neighborly conversations—persist. Like Bes, they whisper from the corners. They can’t be fully stamped out.
Why This Matters
Akhenaten’s reforms didn’t last. After his death, Egypt erased his name, restored the old gods, and reopened the symbolic commons. His attempt at enclosure was dramatic—but ultimately reversible.
What happens in our own time remains uncertain. But the stakes are eerily similar.
When we lose the ability to share in meaning-making, we lose something more than civility—we lose reality as a commons. And when one figure or faction claims exclusive rights to define the real, we’re not just facing political conflict. We’re facing epistemic enclosure.
Which is why the survival of Bes still matters.
And maybe why your neighbor’s stubborn attachment to shared truth, humor, or old-fashioned decency matters too.
Not everything can be enclosed.