Ted Cogswell used to give himself titles, mostly by ordering return address mailing labels from Grayarc. One proclaimed him a Brigadier General, U.S. Podiatric Corps, Retired. Another proclaimed him the Vicar General of an obscure religious order.
In real life he was a professor of English in a small college; a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, International Brigade, in the Spanish Civil War; an excellent science fiction writer who hated to write and never turned out enough stories to live on; the publisher of an amateur magazine called The Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty First Century Studies, generally known as PITSFCS (which is pronounced just as you suspect it is); and the central figure in a number of bizarre stories, all of which are both true and more exotic than any member of the U.S. Podiatric Corps would suspect.
In a word, Ted was not always what he seemed. Neither are the people in his stories. Empires may be founded by supermen; but there are other ways as well.