Motivate This

If you have ever worked as an office temporary, you have probably seen the motivational poster pictured above.
The first time I encountered it, I was dismayed and bewildered.

TEAMWORK. MANY HANDS. MANY MINDS. ONE GOAL.

Is this a sick joke?, I wondered.

This poster suggests the Great Wall was an ancient form of Habitat for Humanity, with neighbor helping neighbor and stranger helping stranger, all with good intention- but that's not a very accurate image.
That wall was built because of teamwork, alright- it was built to keep opposing 'teams' apart, sort of like a giant stone volleyball net that the naked eye can see from Earth orbit.

In truth, the Chinese spent over a thousand years building that wall and not all of the labor was voluntary. Portions were built by conscripts, convicts, slaves, the poor and other members of the sacrificial class, who were sometimes worked until they literally dropped dead on the job.
At day's end, the bodies would be collected and dumped into mass graves within spitting distance of the Wall. Some were actually interred in the structure itself.
Go Team!

You know what else the Chinese spent a lot of time working on?
Gunpowder.
Some of the world's first weaponized rockets were launched at the same Mongols that portions of the wall were built to defend against.

Ironically, it was gunpowder that made the Wall obsolete militarily. Imagine a game of Rock, Scissors, Paper. The wall is 'Rock'. Artillery is 'Paper'. Hunker down!

China eventually annexed Mongolia and held it until shortly before World War One; the newly -independent Mongolia was soon 'acquired' by the Russians and later, the Klingons....meanwhile, Mao's Cultural Revolution transformed China into a "Worker's Paradise" ; following Mao's death in 1976, the Chinese government credited much of his humanistic achievements to the teamwork of the so-called Gang of Four, who were subsequently rewarded with lengthy prison terms and commuted executions.

TEAMWORK

MANY HANDS. MANY CUFFS. SCAPE GOATS.

I wager that I could sneak into my old office and replace this poster:










with this one:


and it would be days, maybe weeks, before anyone noticed.


Bets?