Yea but there is a little bit of a difference here. One is talking about regular people falling into a tradition with family, the other is someone taking over as an autocratic ruler of a country and scraping the barrel for every shred of legitimacy they can muster to convince everyone they're ordained by god to be their authority. If your predecessor or several of them did a thing, well just in case you might as well too.

Curious if you mean nearsighted people or all people needing glasses. There are tons of farsighted people like myself that need glasses to live in our modern society to get by, but wouldn't be significantly impacted even just a few hundred years ago if we didn't need to read or work with things on a small scale. I can see the stars just fine without my glasses. Additionally as people age they tend to need glasses as well and today people are living longer generally, so that is also creating more need.