Excerpt from The Myth of Human Supremacy

Divine Right of Kings (p. 231)

From chapter "The Divine Right of Machines"

Years ago my friend Frances Moore Lappé told me she derives a certain amount of optimism from the question, “Why did people stop believing in the Divine Right of Kings?” Her answer? “They just did. At one point they believed that kings were put on the throne by God, and then at some point they didn’t. My optimism comes from the fact that they just stopped believing in this destructive notion. We can do that with other destructive notions as well.”

I wish I shared her optimism. But it seems clear to me that people have not, in fact, stopped believing in the Divine Right of Kings. This belief, and the Great Chain of Being that rationalizes it, runs our culture more now than ever before; it is just that the insanity, megalomania, power-lust, feelings of specialness and superiority, and claims to unbounded power that used to be associated specifically with royalty have now spread to the widest reaches and most formative depths of this supremacist culture. The Divine Right of Kings has not been abandoned. It has morphed into the Divine Right of Humans, especially the Divine Right of Industrial (“Developed”) Humans. Even worse, it has morphed into the Divine Right of Machines.