QUOTE : But the most lasting economic contribution of the first myth of the machine was the separation between those who worked and those who lived in idleness on the surplus extracted from the worker by reducing his standard of living to penury. Forced poverty made possible forced labor: in an agricultural society both rested on the royal monopoly of land and the control of the usufruct. According to Akkadian and Babylonian scriptures, the gods created men in order to free themselves from the hard necessity of work. Here, as in so many other places, the gods prefigured in fantasy what kings actually did.