Pachacuti Intro
We Incas do believe in an afterlife. That is the reason for our ghoulish practice of mummifying our dead. Luckily, mummification is quite easy in our Andean climate, requiring nothing more than removing the internal organs and then exposing the body to the bracing mountain air. The point of doing the mummification, of course, is so the spirits of the dead can come back and reclaim their bodies when the time comes.
Personally, in my role as combination of emperor, commander-in-chief, and supreme spiritual leader, I thought that this little fiction about the afterlife was a useful way to help motivate our average citizen to keep up the excruciatingly hard work that I, my predecessors and successors all demanded of them. It was no coincidence that “heaven” in our religion was a place where there was no more work to do and you could just relax. That was a key part of the management model I developed—if people work harder they create more value. That simple.
I never actually thought that in the year 2001, precisely 600 years after I died, I would have the chance as I did in fact to come down and reclaim my mummified body, which had sat silently for decades in the eerie hall of the mummmies in that grandest of all temples, the legenday Coricancha, in our imperial capital of Cuzco, until it was hurriedly taken out and hidden to protect it from the marauding Spanish. Sitting with me along one side of the hall to my right were the mummies of my eight predecessors, starting with Manco the Great; and to the left my son and grandson, the only two Incas who had died before those nasty Spaniard conquistadors showed up. Across from us, lined up on the other side of the hall, were the mummies of our queens or “Coyas”. I think both myself and the other mummies all looked quite good, thank you very much. Our skin was in pristine condition, and our hair was the same quality and in the same pageboy style as it had been in life. We all had on our very finest clothing, and the golden eyeballs we all had in certainly must have completed our unique look.
In any case, when I first saw your 21st century society, I was flabbergasted by the advanced you made. My great-grandsons certainly must have thought the Spaniards were a highly advanced civilization, with their mastery of the written word, and instruments of war, such as swords and metal armor, with the help of which they slaughtered hundreds of thousands of my defenseless countrymen if the course of taking over our empire. Of course there is no comparison with the automobiles and airplanes and computers and advanced political business models that the modern era has developed.
On second thought, though, the machines are nothing more than some artifacts of your civilization. And the political and business models are inferior, I think, to those that I pioneered 600 years ago. This book is meant to show you details of those models, and explain how well they worked both in our primitive Incan society of more than half a millenium ago, and could work in today’s society. Along the way, I also want to give you a peek inside the fascinating world of the most advanced society existing at the time in the Americas.