Aristocratic elites enforce virtue by inducing fear through ceremony and display

Evidence

The motivational strategy is essentially very simple. It is to play, positively and negatively, on fear. Positively, fear is induced with the ceremonial paraphernalia of kingship and lordship and rhetoric and ritual and their latter-day equivalents: Mao suits and flags and speeches and parades, or silk shirts and Mercedes and retinues of flunkeys (one thinks, for instance, of Jonathan Miller’s entirely plausible transposition of the action of Rigoletto in his 1982 production of the opera from the court in early modern Mantua to Manhattan’s Little Italy). — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1588

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• QUESTION: The Rigoletto/Little Italy transposition — does the ceremony-signaling mechanism map onto how the doctor’s wife tries to impose order without any ceremonial authority?

Related

• Elites induce obedience through ceremonial displays playing on fear (similarity 0.89)