States continuously recraft mythologies to legitimize their power

Evidence

It is by now generally understood that the formation of nation-states and political reigns precipitate the development of founding myths—myths of origin, in the language of anthropologists. Though the process may have been obscured by time in more distant eras, the emergences of the bourgeoisies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made it explicit. Their use of print and press, their appeals to and seductions of the classes they wished to dominate, made the fabrication of national myths quite evident. These myths were to be recognized in the official instruments of class hegemony: national creeds, social ideologies, philosophical tenets, constitutions, and the like, their function was to legitimate the social orders that had come into being. These myths made the new order a necessary one, an inevitable and benevolent event. They indicated to the national populace that the strains of historical novelty, the insecurities and anxieties accompanying the break with established forms were temporary, that change was natural, organic, and right. Founding myths were substituted for history, providing the appearance of historical narrative to what was in actuality part fact and part class-serving rationales. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 872 (#expands, via linked claim)

The structural dissimilarity between areas of administrative action and areas of cultural tradition constitutes, then, a systematic limit to attempts to compensate for legitimation deficits through conscious manipulation. Of course, a crisis argument can be constructed from this only in connection with the broader point that the expansion of state activity produces the side effect of a disproportionate increase in the need for legitimation. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 678 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Truth-bearing worldviews become instruments of organized barbarism once wielded as power.; State intervention to secure legitimation generates an ever-deepening need for more legitimation — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2697; Empire generates the scholarly paradigms that then legitimize its interventions. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 263 (+13 more)

Broader Connections

• Nation-state formation generates founding myths that legitimate ruling-class orders #corroborates (0.95)
• Nation-states fabricate founding myths to legitimate class rule #expands (0.93) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 872
• State expansion creates a legitimation deficit it cannot administratively control #complicates (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 678