Abdicating Freedom

A reader recently posed a question to 'Dear Annie' that the current 'Annie' was unable to answer. The question was, 'Why are so many people in the U.S.A. obsessed with British Royalty?'. Since Annie was unable to answer it in her column, I will answer it in my blog.

People are obsessed with royalty, both British and otherwise, because they dream of happier times where someone else takes charge of things and turns the world into Camelot. They tend to forget that in such a world, the serfs (whom they would be) are never invited to the ball, don't have fairy godmothers who help them meet handsome princes, and that if they did meet a prince, he'd likely drag them into the nearest haystack (whether they were willing or not), take his pleasure with them, then screw off into the sunset where his legally wedded princess of proper blood awaits him.

Serfs serve only one purpose: to be worked and taxed to death so that royalty can party.

Image: Pixabay

Alas! Were it only so simple as daydreams of pretty castles and gilded carriages! Sadly, though, there is a much darker impulse that is also at work in this strange yearning for a king to rule over them; there is the desire to have a strongman to lead them all.

The desire for a strongman, a king, or a dictator to take up the reins of government, is an abdication of personal freedom in the face of cowardly fear that often happens when the going gets tough, and people no longer want to bear the burden of thinking for themselves. They want someone else to do the heavy lifting for them, someone else to bear the glory or the blame, someone else to make the hard decisions for them. When the going gets tough, the weak flock to authoritarianism... .

Which is what we are now seeing on a global scale. What is the difference between a king and an authoritarian despot? Nothing much. You can't even really say that one is born to it by right of blood and the other is only a commoner who rose to above his station, because the right of kings to rule based on bloodlines alone is not entirely how it really was. Kings used to choose their successors based on ability, and that meant sometimes declaring the royal heir to be a younger son, or even someone who wasn't one of the royal offspring. In some cases, the next king was chosen by a meeting of chieftains from among their own number. The idea was always to select the fittest man among them to rule (or at least it was supposed to be).

What do we have these days? A choice between Idiot A, Idiot B, and sometimes Idiot C. It is no wonder that people have started crying out for someone else to step up to the plate. But where have we seen this before?

In the book of Samuel, I think (and I am including this to remind bible-thumpers that kings were a punishment meted out to the ancient Hebrews by God).

"But you have today rejected your God, who delivers you from all your calamities and your distresses; yet you have said, 'No, but set a king over us!' Now therefore, present yourselves before the LORD by your tribes and by your clans."
1 Samuel 10:19 (New American Standard)

The demand for a king, and the rejection of the old system of judges was the result of the corruption and nepotism that had taken root in it. The people were being abused, and wanted a new system, one just like their neighbors had. And so they got what they wanted, only to see just how much worse it could be.

At least, under the old system of judges, they had had local and personal autonomy. The Samuel story depicts the rejection of freedom, with all the uncertainty for the perceived security of a strongman running things. It also details the painful demise of the rule of law as a result of its being consolidated into the hands of a specific dynasty. Once that happened, the dynasty itself ceased respecting the laws that it was supposed to enforce, and instead began to find ways to profit from them. "I am the son of the judge Eli, so I can take the best part of the sacrifice, force women to sleep with me, and generally do whatever I want" - in a nutshell, that is the whole story of what eventually happened to the biblical judges, and what we see happening now in our supposedly 'democratic' countries. Our justice systems, our legislative systems, and just about any other place from which power can be exercised have fallen into the hands of tight-knit families who scorn the very things they are supposed to be caring for.

So now we have people crying more and more for a good old authoritarian government, with a strongman at the helm. If it is bad now, what do people think is going to happen when they institute government by decree? When freedom is being taken away, and the rule of law perverted, then it is up to the people to fight for what matters, not abdicate their rights in the hopes that their dreamed of strongman will do it for them.

The only thing they'll get out of doing that is even deeper enslavement.

Image: Pixabay