One very important thing about the worthy God-Emperor of Mankind is that he does not seek legitimacy in the eyes of his subjects.

I mean, sure, he’ll get it, a lot of the time.  There are always many humans who will worship power, whatever form it may take in their generation.  And if – as we are positing – he is in fact a worthy monarch, if his decisions are just and noble decisions that advance the welfare of humanity, then a host of people will work very hard to find abstract ideals that justify the fact of his rule.

But actually trying to cultivate legitimacy, trying to weigh upon people’s minds and souls in order to convince them that they ought to obey you as a matter of moral right, is in itself an act of power-hoarding.  It is a sacrifice of good government for continued government, a move in the direction of ruling wrongly so that you may be allowed to continue to rule at all.  And thus it belongs to petty tyrants. 

Leviathan says simply obey, or face the consequences, and allows your intellect to process the cosmic meaning of that dictum as it sees fit.  Leviathan does not care whether you despise him, so long as you do not hinder the flourishing of mankind. 

Mencius Moldbug – of all people! – actually grasped this particular point, sort of, with his depiction of the gold-obsessed alien overlord Fnargl.  It’s a shame that he lost hold of the idea in basically everything else he had to say about government.