A Modern Pyramid and its Pharaoh (On Context and Perception)

On a road heading out of Yerevan there is a pyramid. The project was started as an expansion to a casino by one of Armenia's oligarchs, a large and superstitious man know more for his brutality than his business acumen. 

For several years the project was at a standstill, construction cranes unmoved, progress a foreign motion.

Some time back I was travelling to Dilijan with a friend. We passed the garish construct, still incomplete, when my friend said "Do you know why it's unfinished? It's because he's scared he'll die when it's done."

Apparently someone informed the oligarch that pyramids were built as tombs, and their completion was a death knell for the pharaoh as well as his grave. Frightened at the thought of dying before his time, the oligarch ceased construction; the unfinished pyramid a monument to his stupidity and arrogance.

Recently I began to consider the past, the magnificent monuments built to celebrate the leaders of once great civilizations. Men who once commanded armies without check and built iconic structures with slave hands, whose remains we venerate and cherish as part of our unified world heritage.

I look to these kings, czars, and pharaohs and wonder where delineation between them and men like this oligarch lie; their similar conflict resolution techniques, that same fear of death, an uncontrolled desire for immortality, the heightened sense of self importance, and a general disregard for the common man.

I think perhaps the only difference is context and perception.