Governments Have Been Using Religion to Control People Since the Beginning of Civilization

 The oldest trick in the book of power is not money. It is not armies. It is not law.

It is God.

Tell people that you rule because God chose you. Tell them that questioning you is questioning God. Tell them that the social order they live under is divinely ordained and therefore sacred. Tell them that suffering in this life is rewarded in the next.

That idea has been used by rulers to control populations since the first cities were built in ancient Mesopotamia five thousand years ago. It is still being used today. And understanding that history changes how you see every government that has ever claimed God was on its side.

How It Started in Mesopotamia

The first cities in human history were built between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq. The Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians. Each of these civilizations built their political structures directly on top of their religious structures.

In Mesopotamia, kings were human representatives of the city-state's patron deity, and priests took care of the temple cult. It was nearly impossible for politics to stay away from religion and vice versa, so both spheres of influence worked in tandem.

The king did not just claim to be chosen by the gods. The king claimed to speak for the gods. The priests backed that claim in exchange for power and wealth. And the people had no framework for questioning it because the entire world they understood was organized around the same religious ideas.

The Code of Hammurabi in Babylon, one of the oldest known legal documents, begins with a declaration that Hammurabi was chosen by the gods to bring justice. Laws were often believed to be divinely ordained, making them sacred and unchallengeable.

Think about what that means. Not just that the king made the laws. That the laws came from God. Disobeying a law was not just a crime. It was a sin.

How Egypt Took It Further

Ancient Egypt took the concept of divine kingship further than almost any other civilization.

The outstanding feature of Egyptian society during its long history was that the king was considered to be of divine essence, a god incarnate. Egyptians identified the king as Horus, king of the gods, and each successive king took a Horus-name upon his succession.

The pharaoh was not chosen by God. The pharaoh was God. Living among the people in human form.

That is an extraordinarily powerful political tool. You cannot overthrow a god. You cannot petition a god to change his policies. You cannot vote against a god. The entire framework of legitimate political challenge collapses when the ruler is not a representative of divine authority but divine authority itself.

And it worked for thousands of years. The Egyptian state lasted longer as a continuous political entity than almost anything in human history precisely because this framework made resistance almost unthinkable.

How Rome Used It

Rome was more sophisticated about it. The Roman Republic had its own religious structures but the emperors took it further.

An imperial cult is a form of state religion in which emperors are worshipped as demigods or deities. The practice began formally under Augustus and spread across the Empire within decades, with the Roman Senate holding the power to officially declare a deceased emperor divine.

Rome also demonstrated what happened when a new religion challenged the existing power structure. Christianity began as a persecuted minority faith. When the Emperor Constantine converted and made it the state religion in the fourth century, he did not give up power. He absorbed the new religion into the imperial structure and used it for the same purposes the old religion had served.

The pattern is always the same. The religion changes. The use of religion as a tool of political control does not.

Why It Has Always Worked

The reason this strategy has worked for five thousand years is not because people are stupid. It is because it answers a real human need.

People want to know that the world is ordered. That suffering has meaning. That the powerful are accountable to something higher than themselves. Religion provides a framework for all of those things.

When governments attach themselves to that framework they borrow its legitimacy. Challenging the ruler becomes challenging the cosmic order. Accepting your place in society becomes a religious virtue. The machinery of control runs on something more durable than fear alone.

It runs on meaning.

And that is why understanding the history of religion and political power is not just interesting. It is essential to understanding how power actually works.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

The Laughter Epidemic of 1962 Infected Hundreds of People in Africa and Lasted for Months

 On January 30, 1962, three girls at a boarding school in Kashasha in what is now Tanzania started laughing.

They could not stop.

The laughter spread. Within days dozens of students at the school were affected. The laughter was uncontrollable and it did not stop after a few minutes or a few hours. It went on for days. Students who were overcome by the laughter also experienced crying, fainting, rashes, and pain.

The school closed on March 18 after 95 of its 159 students had been affected. But that was not the end of it.

How Far It Spread

When the students were sent home to their villages, the laughter went with them. It spread to the communities where those students lived. Other schools in the region were affected. More villages were impacted.

By the time the epidemic finally died down several months later, hundreds of people across multiple communities had been affected. Some individuals experienced symptoms for weeks at a time.

The affected people were not laughing because something was funny. The laughter was involuntary and distressing. People described it as painful. They could not eat or sleep properly while the episodes were happening. Some people had to be restrained during the worst episodes.

What Caused It

No physical cause was ever identified. Doctors who investigated found no infectious agent, no contaminated food source, and no environmental factor that could explain the outbreak.

The scientific consensus is that the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic was a case of mass psychogenic illness. The same phenomenon that likely caused the Dancing Plague of 1518 that we covered in an earlier post. A real physical response spreading through a community through psychological and social mechanisms rather than biological infection.

The school in Kashasha had opened recently and students were reportedly under significant stress. The political situation in Tanganyika was also tense. The country was approaching independence from British colonial rule, which happened in December 1961. The social pressure on communities during that period was real and significant.

Mass psychogenic illness tends to occur in communities under stress. The physical symptoms, whether laughter or dancing or illness, are real even though they do not have a traditional biological cause.

Why This Story Matters

The Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic is genuinely strange. It is hard to describe without it sounding made up. But it is fully documented by physicians, government officials, and researchers who investigated at the time.

It is also an important piece of evidence about how human beings respond to extreme social stress. We are social creatures in ways that go deeper than we usually acknowledge. What happens in our communities affects our bodies in ways that science is still working to fully understand.

The laughter epidemic of 1962 is one of the most dramatic demonstrations of that we have on record. And almost nobody knows it happened.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

India Lost Three Million People in World War Two and American History Books Barely Mention It

 When American students learn about World War Two they learn about the European theater and the Pacific theater. They learn about D-Day and Midway and the liberation of Paris. They learn about the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.

They almost never learn about India.

Here is what happened in India during World War Two and why it matters.

What India Actually Did

Around 2.5 million Indians served in Allied military forces during World War Two. It was the largest volunteer army in history at that time.

Indian soldiers fought in North Africa. They fought in Italy. They fought in Southeast Asia against Japan. They fought across multiple theaters of the war on multiple continents. Their contribution to the Allied effort was enormous.

And roughly three million people in India died as a result of World War Two conditions.

Most of those deaths did not happen in battle. They happened in Bengal in 1943 during a famine that historians now largely attribute to British wartime policies.

The Bengal Famine of 1943

The Bengal Famine killed between two and three million people in British-controlled India.

There was food in the region. The famine was not caused by an absolute shortage of food. It was caused by a combination of factors that included British wartime policies, the prioritization of food exports to feed British troops and populations elsewhere, war related disruption to food distribution, and decisions made by British colonial administrators that Indian lives mattered less than British strategic interests.

Winston Churchill, who is celebrated in Western history books as a hero of World War Two, made comments about Indians during this period that historians have described as deeply callous. His government's policies contributed to the conditions that killed millions of people in Bengal while the war was being fought.

This is documented history. It is not disputed by serious historians. And it is almost entirely absent from the World War Two history that American students learn.

Why the Gap Exists

American World War Two history focuses on American and British contributions and sacrifices because those were the countries that shaped the postwar world and wrote most of the dominant historical narratives.

India was a British colony. Its soldiers fought under British command. Its resources were mobilized in service of British war aims. And the suffering of its people during the war was treated as a colonial management problem rather than as a human tragedy worthy of historical attention.

Three million people died. That is almost eight times the total American military deaths in the entire war. And most Americans have never heard the words Bengal Famine.

That is not a small oversight. That is a fundamental gap in how the war gets remembered and who gets counted as having contributed and suffered.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.