Rulers of nations and upper crust people in general have always been good at creating propaganda to justify their positions. On Friday night Sylvia and I went to a showing of "Pray the Devil Back to Hell," a movie about how Liberian women banded together to end the war in their country, get rid of a bloodthirsty dictator, and institute democracy. That was in 2003. I recommend the movie to everyone--inspiring, uplifting. At one point the dictator, Charles Taylor, made a speech about how he was holding the country together and it would descend into chaos without him. We've recently heard the same speech from the dictators of Egypt, Syria, and Yemen.
In the U.S. we keep hearing propaganda about cutting taxes on the rich--that this will create jobs for the poor and lift up the economy. Herbert Hoover cut the tax rate to the lowest in modern history, and the Crash of 1929 followed. Tax rates for the rich have been going down almost to pre-Depression levels, and we've got the highest unemployment rate since the Depression. It doesn't seem to matter that the facts contradict the propaganda--it just gets repeated and repeated over the airwaves.
Of course the art of propaganda is a lot older than broadcast media. If you want to get real historical, check out the song for the carriers of a palanquin, which appears on the walls of the tomb of Ipi, a nobleman of the Egypt's Old Kingdom (2613-2181 BCE): "O palanquin of Ipi, be as heavy as I wish/It is pleasanter full than when it is empty!" I don't know who wrote that song, but I bet it wasn't the guys who had to carry the palanquin.
Another lie that's as old as history is sometimes called the "divine right of kings." The earliest mention of it that I can find is from the Sumerian king list, which says, "After kingship descended from Heaven, the kingship was in Eridu." (Eridu was one of the oldest cities in the world, founded around 5400 BCE.) The divine right lie lasted until the American and French Revolutions, but it never really went away. As late as 1909, a judge condemned New York factory workers who wanted their hours reduced from 65 or 75 per week to 52 per week, saying, "You are on strike against God." In other words, the existing social order was ordained by Heaven.
The abovementioned Charles Taylor insisted that he was in his position because God put him there. I'm sure that some form of the divine right lie serves to buttress the absolute monarchies of Saudi Arabia and several other Gulf States.
To which I can only counter by quoting the 14th Century English priest John Ball: "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?...cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty."
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