RE: Memoirs of a fallen Sith - divide et impera
That's some sneaky social planning!
The equivalent I guess in modernity would be the media. As Malcolm X stated, "The media is the most powerful entity on earth, because they control the minds of the masses."
The media or, in broader terms, art. Which Plato hated, precisely because it could so easily manipulate minds without so much as a pretense to any proper argument.
Its open-endedness and appeal to emotion is also what makes it so easily absorbed, whereas with more properly "academic" works, where the terms used are very precise, they don't leave much room for freedom in the audience: you must accept the work wholesale, idiosyncrasies and all, whereas art lets you think whatever you want while surreptitiously planting its intended message. You may wonder for example what the meaning of The Matrix is, while leaving completely unquestioned the common and repeated idea of the Hero figure, the Neo/One, always a single person saving the whole universe, which inwardly all who watch the movie believe themselves to be, and identify and take pleasure from the movie for this reason, i.e. selfishness.
A point of the previous paragraph was made much better by Schopenhauer:
The poet presents the imagination with images from life and human characters and situations, sets them all in motion and leaves it to the beholder to let these images take his thoughts as far as his mental powers will permit. This is why he is able to engage men of the most differing capabilities, indeed fools and sages together. The philosopher, on the other hand, presents not life itself but the finished thoughts which he has abstracted from it and then demands that the reader should think precisely as, and precisely as far as, he himself thinks. That is why his public is so small.
Indeed, theatre was primarily used for religious gatherings in Greece, until it degenerated into an entertainment venue. Much of modern religious and government operations have the echoes of the pageantry and mythology from an earlier era. Art was the information medium through which the organizational institutions, be it religious or secular, adjusted public perceptions pertaining to the world. One could argue that rituals of institutional religions are the templates, upon which all mass psychologic control is based; such control mechanisms represent the pinnacle of human mental manipulation, of governing principle from a more elegant era.
The modern day media are reduced to vulgar entertainment venues that make the Roman gladiatorial combat appear the height of human sophistication and erudition. Modern art serves no purpose other than as a hedge against inflation, much like precious metals_, that can be to sold off to some other pretentious buffoon, who imagines the bauble will always appreciate in monetary value. Representative governments are reduced to using crude physical mechanisms of control, rather than subtle manipulation of the mind. It is truly preferable to be enslaved by our forebears than to live free in the modern cultural dessert built on "yeast-less factuality," that are barely held together in ever-increasing legal shackles, whose only concern is acquisition of money.