I may be overstating my case just as the creators of “The Crown” have exaggerated and taken liberties with the more salacious peccadillos of the Windsor’s for TV ratings, but I have been watching the oversized, hysterical public reaction to Prince Harry’s exit, and wondering how the second son of a wife who was badly treated by a family intent on portraying a certain image garners so much press. I started following Quora on the royals and was disheartened to see how many royal watchers, both British and American, trashed Meghan and Harry for jumping ship and “disrespecting” HH the Majesty the Queen, as if this was the end of the world. More disconcerting, it’s the same crowd that has adopted the stance of fast-talking Hollywood lawyers when it comes to defending the indefensible Prince Andrew’s pricey payoff to Virginia Guiffre. Let’s be honest--that alone should be enough to end the crown. It really is time to end the culture of rich, powerful men getting away with sexual abuse, but it is not going to happen. The Queen is not the Pope even though she heads an apostolic church of some consequence, but her second son is not a priest and has not taken a vow of celibacy.
The consequences of these petty family squabbles don’t seem as consequential and deadly as the outbreak of WW1 or Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but we avoid examining them at our peril. I would like to examine how public perception and obsession hold so much sway.
In an article excerpted from her book, “The Rhyme of History, the Lessons of the Great War,” historian Margaret MacMillan points to the ambiguity that still remains after more than 32,000 articles, treatises, and books have been published investigating its causes. Then she mentions Freud’s theory “narcissism of small differences,” Narzissmus der kleinen Differenzen. The thesis, according to his 1930 “Civilization and Its Discontents,” is defined as “communities with adjoining territories and close relationships [being] especially likely to engage in feuds and mutual ridicule because of hypersensitivity to details of differentiation.” A few paragraphs further on he says: “Every time two families become connected by a marriage, each of them thinks itself superior to or of better birth than the other. Of two neighboring towns each is the other’s most jealous rival; every little canton looks down upon the others with contempt.”
Jonathan Swift in his 1792 novel Gulliver's Travels described this phenomenon when writing about how two groups entered into a long and vicious war after they disagreed on which was the best end to break an egg. It may be a stretch to compare the German naval expansion in the early XXth century to counter the British domination of the seas to breaking an egg, but the emotional tone of the the humiliation of Harry and Meghan seems as senseless as the furor over the assassination of two royals in far away Sarajevo. When tied to the world wide emotional reaction to the death of Princess Dianna, the connections become clearer and, I would argue, more troublesome. No one was about to go to war over the cloudy, unnecessary death of the British royal, but her involvement with an Egyptian lover, the rise of anti-Muslim feelings in the UK did have a huge effect on political life in Britain and Brexit. One could argue that there were many other factors involved, and I will not protest. But a surefire way to concoct a recipe for an economic disaster is to mix in a pinch of salacious sex. Too much salt will spoil any good dish.
Archduke Ferdinand was not directly related to the German Kaiser Wilhelm or the Russian Czar Nicholas who were uncles and cousins, but Ferdinand was tight with the Kaiser and when the Serbs got involved, the consequences were catastrophic. 40 million people died in Europe between 1914 and 1918. Spoiled Wilhelm hated Edward for being what he considered a nitwit uncle, but Edward managed to pull his cousin Nicholas into his corner of the family fray. Their narcissism of small differences obscured any real solutions other than wholesale slaughter. They may have spoken different languages when haranguing their subjects but they were all steeped in the same emotional language of pretty jealousy and privilege, and they duped the world into taking sides. The First World War was family rivalry. Period.
