Pharaoh built temples.
Hold that for a second, because it is stranger than it sounds. Here is a man the Quran uses as the archetype of tyranny, who said I am your lord, most high, who enslaved a people and drowned pursuing them. And he built temples. He made offerings. He maintained an entire priesthood whose job was to mediate between him and something above him.
So did Caesar. So did the Mongol khans, who kept their shamans through conquests that killed perhaps forty million people.
Every one of those men was a monster by the standards of the people they ruled over. And every one of them operated inside a frame where something outranked him.
We do not.
Since roughly 1991, authority has not sat with a person, a dynasty, a city, a nation, or even an ideology. It sits with systems, and nobody is driving them.
Now try the test that every previous age would pass. Name the person responsible.
You cannot. That is not a failure of your research. There is no name. Decisions that reshape billions of lives are produced by something with no face, no capital city, no ruler and no accountability, and that is genuinely without precedent. Anonymous power is new.
A restraint you do not believe in still restrains you.
Pharaoh's temples did not make Pharaoh good. Obviously not. But they meant there existed a category of act that was forbidden rather than merely expensive, and a class of people whose job was to say so, and a story in which he could lose.
Take that away and you have not removed a superstition. You have removed the only category the system had for "this is not permitted regardless of what it earns". What replaces it is compliance: an act is fine if it is legal in the jurisdiction where it happens, and jurisdictions can be selected.
Move fast and break things was a slogan a technology industry printed on its walls. Try to imagine any previous civilisation adopting that as a public motto. It would have read as a confession.
The reason this one is different is not that it is crueller than Assyria. It is not. It is that Assyria knew it could be judged.
We have built the first civilisation in recorded history that has no answer to the question and who are you accountable to, and we treat that as an achievement rather than the thing most likely to be our undoing.
Pharaoh would not have understood it. He was a tyrant, not a fool.