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It only struck me the other day that Americans really, really hate the royal family. However, all hate is just love—so they are also obsessed by it. The first point to note is that the presidency is exactly the same as the royal family—as the king. You only think there’s a difference if you’re caught up in the subjective experience of the thing, of “we’re a republic, so we don’t have to listen to those inbred freaks”.
If you’re not caught up in that, it’s obviously the same: the king is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, the president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces—both are head of state. It is the same office (except the king is the head of the national Church, whereas America’s de facto Church is Harvard, the old divinity school, and it’s run by Jews).
So it’s the same thing—there is no difference, other than the hereditary aspect. And, indeed, the Founding Fathers considered a king for a time (King George I—and people who are in the synchronicity business can’t help but think there was more to the George vs. George showdown than meets the eye).
The Founders also considered, through Hamilton, that the president could be elected for a life-term. The office of elective monarch is not uncommon in history—and America could have had one. Just imagine how much more stable America would be if each president reigned—and they do reign—for 40 years or so, not four (if we assume the earliest they could run for office would be 35, per the Constitution).
So it’s the same office—so why does it arouse such potent emotions (in Americans)? The fact is that America was founded on the explicit repudiation of heredity—that is what it means not to have an official aristocracy or a king; and that is what really angers Americans—not the office but its hereditary aspect. Tom Paine, the most leftist Founding Father, said that it was as preposterous that there should be a “hereditary monarch” as a “hereditary astronomer”.
As it turns out, about a century later, Galton, relation to Darwin, recorded in his carefully worked-out treatise on genius that genius does indeed run in families—the great astronomer will beget a great astronomer (or, perhaps, a great biologist).
We didn’t have to wait for Galton to “do the science” on this issue. Why do you value that “small family-owned business that has been in the same trade for five generations”?—because the skill is hereditary, whether it’s fine Italian leather belts or pastries (not to mention there is something in the tradition, something phenomenological and Heideggerian, in the way you learn to make the pasta by watching your grandfather’s hands—it can’t be taught to just anybody, it’s not available at a technical college).
So it follows that aristocracy and kingship make sense—for if other traits are inherited, the talent for rulership is also inherited. And this was how everyone thought for centuries—right up to the 18th century, in fact, when we suddenly became retarded.
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A further advantage to aristocracy and kingship, as noted by Samuel Johnson, is that everyone knows their place in an aristocratic society and so anxiety and envy are reduced. Your place is immutable—you may make money or win a medal for bravery, but you cannot change your grade. What society, by the way, is the most anxious on earth—which society is soaked in anti-anxiety meds and anti-depressants? America—the most egalitarian society on earth where only money and whatever social status you can throw together this week counts.
Since nobody can be sure where they stand in America, everyone is very afraid—afraid to lose, hence anxious, hence angry (anger originating in fear); indeed, Americans are angry enough to shoot each other all the time, apparently. Since there are no fixed social grades, there is instead constant agitation by mass propaganda—both government and commercial—to alter rank status (say, by eliminating all white characters from films—or reducing them to subordinate, evil, or risible positions). Again, it makes people rather anxious and, ultimately, unhappy—even though they live in the most wealthy society on earth.
If you listen to Americans talk, as I listen to American students and tourists in cafes, you will find that though they are louder than English people the salient characteristic is their narcissism—particularly the women. This is because they live in a society where, from a young age, they have been exposed to an alternation between humiliation and adulation—humiliation for failure to conform to what the group thinks is “cool” this week, adulation when they are in line with the group (“Good job, buddy…waayyyy to go”).
This alternation between humiliation and adoration creates narcissism. Americans are preoccupied by status because their society has no firm status anchors and so they must be ever alert to adapt their social act to maximise their status—which means to follow where the mass goes next.
The high school movie is an American staple because for Americans this is a crucial moment in their psychological development where they experience large doses of humiliation and/or adulation—you were either, so I understand, stuffed in a locker or you were carried around on people’s shoulders as the school football star and slept with all the cheerleaders (Hollywood may have skipped some details—but I take it to be a roughly correct sketch).
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So Americans don’t like the royal family because it suggests there’s something greater than “moi”. The royal family is a narcissistic wound for Americans—and so they are obsessed with it because “it just won’t go away” and yet they are repelled by it at the same time. It’s effectively a horror film dynamic—you want to turn away but you have to look. It’s also a sexual dynamic—sex and horror are about the same thing, really; and if you think about those slithery-slimey beasties that crawl up the cheerleader’s skirt…
Anyway, the royal family is also some Oedipal trip because the Americans “killed dad” when they achieved independence—except, unlike the French (actually, unlike the English), they didn’t. This is perhaps another problem—the English executed their king (Charles I), the French executed their king. The Americans didn’t do so—they left dad but dad was still alive (with the mother country, married to her). In fact, dad is still alive now—so when Americans attack the royal family there’s a strong element of a teenager kicking against paternal authority.
Americans sort of flip the bird at the royal family, but sort of half respect it and fear it at the same time (sometimes it cramps their style when they’re trying to look cool—the eternal teenage curse of the uncool father watering the lawn with a hose in his shorts; sometimes it dabs water on them so it looks like he peed himself—so uncool *cringe*, and he doesn’t seem to care).
In a way, the English are more democratic than the Americans—the English killed their king; they killed dad (possibly slept with mom). The Americans told dad to “fuck off and let me do my own thing!” (*slams door*). Dad didn’t come and rebuke you because you’re his son but also because mom (English liberals, English Whigs) said not to—“Don’t be so harsh on him, he’s just trying to work things out.” He’s been trying to work things out since 1776.
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So the royals remain an eternal rebuke for Americans: it reminds them that there is reality, something beyond their narcissistic manipulative bubble, and that reality doesn’t care about their act. No matter how much you try to act cool you will not be royal—and that makes you feel very bad, so you’ll stomp and storm about the royal family and talk about them all the time and say you hate them (and yet you talk about them all the time—because you crave the real, blood and God, and not the stupid act that doesn’t fool anybody, not even yourself).
Democracy is an envy machine—it exists to cultivate envy, as does advertisement and remorseless consumer commercialism (you have to desire what others have). America is a very democratic and very commercial society—so people there feel very envious all the time. They desire what others have so much, they’re prepared to destroy it if they can’t have it. Indeed, the real crime is to create something that is not accessible to everyone—like a monarchy (so that has to be destroyed).
Envy is more than jealousy. To be jealous is to want what someone else has—envy is when you want something but you also feel that the fact someone has it is an insult to you (a narcissistic injury), so you destroy it (if I can’t have it, nobody else will—like when a child stomps on another child’s sandcastles at the beach). Jealousy is not so bad—envy is poison, it provokes people to destroy beautiful things just because those things make them feel insignificant.
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America is against both the family and God—that might sound strange to say, because Americans talk about both, in positive terms, frequently. However, for America to be both against family and God is implicit in the revolution itself.
Revolutionaries often don’t realise the implications of what they say. In the French Revolution, Gracchus Babeuf emerged and said, “We cannot have real liberty and equality until private property has been abolished.” Babeuf was guillotined, but he was right. He was just a very consistent revolutionary—the first modern communist. If some people can, for example, hire ten expensive lawyers to fight their free speech case, then they have more free speech than other people—so until property is abolished, liberty cannot be realised.
It’s why I can’t stand liberals. As a teenager, I was a Communist—but I have never been a liberal. Liberals are hypocrites. They talk about liberty, equality, and brotherhood but only so far as it removes the influence of priests and aristocrats—liberalism is, as Marx correctly noted, liberty and equality for merchants to achieve their selfish aims.
When people like Babeuf, the working masses, try to realise the liberal slogans, the liberals call on residual aristocrats (soldiers) and priests to put down the mob—being hypocrites. The liberal society is characterised by selfishness, greed, and hypocrisy—the Communist society represents consistent liberalism; in its most consistent realisation, under Pol Pot, it kills everyone in the society.
Hence, as with the French Revolution and private property, the Founding Fathers were against the family but didn’t realise it. The king and the aristocracy are the family in macrocosm—the national family. If you do not accept the hereditary principle you do not, in fact, accept that families are real. It only seems different because men like Paine and Franklin created an artificial division in their minds between aristocracy and families—and yet a consistent man, like Babeuf, sees through that.
Hence if you think it is unjust for the king to pass his throne to his son, don’t you also think that it is unjust for a father to pass his property to his son? It’s the same principle—why should he own it, just because, by accident of birth, this man is his father? Can an astronomer birth an excellent astronomer? The most advanced liberals, around 1848, held that inheritance should be abolished—they were only consistent, a liberal female friend of Nietzsche, a genuine ’48er, Malwida von Meysenbug, advocated extensively for inheritance to be abolished.
So, just like the French Revolution, the American Revolution had implications that the people who started it didn’t realise—latent ideas connected to the destruction of the family, and the abolition of private property. To hate the royal family is to hate our own family—to hate the idea that you belong to any unit greater than you as an atomised individual who uses “reason” to improve his position.
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America is also de facto atheist—another reason to hate the royal family, since it heads the national Church. The division of Church and state in America is akin to the proposition that there is no religion in the country—and, indeed, the real religion Americans worship is the Constitution (a contrivance of man). Americans worship in many churches—but if you really want to offend them, attack the Constitution.
Notably, the more religious Americans become the more reverence they have for the Constitution—because that is what they really reverence, a document that destroys religion. The more you have religious Christian sentiments, the more you participate in the mystique that is the Constitution—even though, objectively, the Constitution is anti-Christian and the revolution was fought to destroy the influence of a Christian Church on America.
The Founding Fathers were not religious men, America is not a Christian country—except in the sense that the population that happened to occupy its territory for most of its history was predominately Christian. The Founding Fathers thought there was an unknown entity that started the universe and has had nothing to do with it subsequently—and others held the miracles in the Bible didn’t take place.
As with the Victorians, the Founding Fathers went to church but they went, as did the Victorians, because it was what respectable people did—sometime around 1920 people tired of the facade and stopped altogether (America was founded by men who “stopped altogether”, in their hearts, in the 1770s). And, indeed, the wider West really “stopped altogether” in the early 1700s in the educated stratum, but it took a while for decadence to take hold and for the idea that “it’s good for the children” and “the Christian ethical doctrine is superior to all others” to subside.
You can tell nobody really believed it because men like that fraud GK Chesterton would say things like “the problem with Christianity is not that it has been tried and found wanting but that it is has never really been tried.” You see, that statement is already not metaphysical and is modern—if the resurrection was real it would be irrelevant whether the Christian ethos is superior or inferior to others. For Chesterton, being a modern, it is *obviously* not real—it’s just a question of whether the Christian ethos is superior to Confucianism or Utilitarianism; just as the Roman judges found “all religions equally useful” to govern a people—and thought perhaps some were better than others.
Nevertheless, the British monarchy, being an explicitly religious institution, also rebukes Americans—a godless people from their country’s inception. There are only two nations on earth where the head of state is also the head of the national religion—Iran and Britain. Charles is our ayatollah—the English ayatollah. For the narcissist, God is the ultimate insult: aristocrats and kings are still men at least, but God—I mean, there’s this thing that’s so much more than me that it is not possible to comprehend the extent to which it is more than me.
That is a huge blow to your self-importance and it is intolerable to the narcissist—because he lives to embody life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness through reason; and so the royal family, as a divine instrument, reminds him that his aspirations and pretensions are ultimately not that important; hence, like atheists and God, he is obsessed with them, hateful towards them, and desires them—all at the same time.