“It is [the invention of] iron and wheat,” Rousseau wrote, “which first civilized men and ruined the human race” (he had already lambasted the invention of the printing press in his first Discourse) and enabled “a few ambitious men” to subject the rest of the human race “to labor, servitude, and misery.”14 Working for a living becomes man’s greatest curse, symbolized by the daily drudgery of the “nine to five” routine: the bleak cave of capitalism.
