Given the historical tendency of large, powerful human societies in the last couple of thousand years, you do have to give it to empires: running one is hard work. Hard work by itself is not necessarily worthy of uncritical praise or regard of course: pillaging, swindling, and massacring can take plenty of work. But credit where it is due.
To maintain a huge gradated complex of power, based both on the concentration of wealth on one end and the exploitation of whatever can be exploited on the other requires a delicate balance in which you have to convince a lot of people to cooperate with you while at the same time steadily exploiting them, or at least exploiting other people less like them but still human and connected to them in many ways.
This often means a whole lot of lying and contrivance, and just disingenuousness. And when you do this, when you move further away from the heart, and the dictates of reality, it requires a better and better memory to keep track of the lies and artifices and to remain faithful to them, which also requires a strong executive control of one's emotional fidelity to them to remain convincing. And by golly, if you slip up just once, it introduces that seed of doubt, and the trust begins to erode, and things get more difficult, and you have to use more and more force.
Couple that with ever-increasing entropy: lies form premises that generate long paths of dependence of their own, which increasingly spin world events in diverging directions. And you have generation upon generation, growing up further and further from an abandoned truth. From the top, how to impress upon subsequent generations of the privileged to at the same time benefit from and consolidate their positions, while not taking too much? How to teach your progeny to be good ruthless liars while remaining loyal to people like yourself?
The lies will box you into a highly constrained set of possibilities if you can manage to follow them and remain faithful to them, and if you can't, it destroys your credibility and constricts your options further. So yes, in a way this is hard work.
To relate this to our ongoing theme of creation and destruction, many of our particular human tools for affecting creation have destructive aspects that need to be pointed. In crude terms, if you want to take someone's productive land by pointing a gun at them, you better make sure you hit the right person, and not an ally or even yourself.
Not only is lying making use of the abstract tools of language, pointing the lingual forces of creation in one direction (in your direction) and their forces of destruction in another (in their direction), but it also directs tools further downstream to point in directions that you want as well. If you lie your way into a war, that lie is pointing real world weapons and material flows in very specific directions toward specific ends.
So it does take a lot of work to account for where all of these forces are pointing, and as things get more chaotic as a result of this and depart further from your control and you understanding, it becomes easier and easier to be harmed by your own instruments, your own tools, your own decisions and volition.
