The bling. It tells a story we don’t want to understand, which response to the coronation today highlights…
The bling. It tells a story we don’t want to understand, which response to the coronation today highlights for me. I don’t think we recognise that the knee-jerk rejection of constitutional monarchy is another disguised infection by the populism virus. I’m not a ‘monarchist’. /1 https://t.co/dc3kGIvUcc
That’s just one of the teams in our usual process, to turn it into team sports between two opposing sides. Over and over and over again. The monarchist and republican teams will be out in force today, barracking for their side. All completely irrelevant for me. But the bling? /2
Very relevant. The Crown Jewels will be on display today. Many on the republican side will scoff at what to them will be the archaic and irrelevant symbolism. But don’t people notice that wherever we get rid of Kings, we replace them with new ones? The bling! /3 https://t.co/TZFkbyBvQX
Why is bling so important to hip hop culture? Why is ‘luxury’ more generally the big trend of our times? Humans are doing what they always do, because they’re social animals. They conform with or imitate those they admire and want to emulate. That’s what structures groups. /4
The US President for example is a more monarchical future in the US now than the King in the UK. The strictly anti-monarchist ‘world’s greatest democracy’ couldn’t wait to reinstall a monarch, just called a different thing. Hierarchies of value, that’s why luxury is on-trend. /5
Dennis Altman, a staunch republican, wrote this book about why we can’t seem to shake monarchies. Studying it led him to admit we’re too clever by half if we think we can just get rid of them. If we do, again we just reinvent them, with new names. And why? /6 https://t.co/WHyT7qzRYT
Like I said, because it’s that same social process that drives all societies. The building of status hierarchies, through emulation. Luxury or royalty or bling are the peak of the hierarchies, the things others then aspire to and want to emulate. /7
No matter how clever we think we are, you can’t escape this fundamental social process. We all emulate those we admire. That’s what shapes our behaviours. Not ‘politics’. Politics is the same social process, called by other names. I agree with Altman. /8
We can’t better constitutional monarchies, because they combine both ‘democratic’ mechanisms and this emulation mechanism, in the most manageable and productive way. If you strip away the monarchical component, people will reinvent it in ways that we won’t like. /9
Without any grounding in our long history, in our customs and traditions, in our institutions. Tinpot demagogues, with all the royal trappings. Social media influencers. That same passion we seem to feel to step away all of that is a dark desire, which needs light. /10 https://t.co/6qSFoJPNhg
It’s that same iconoclastic desire the minimisers weaponise to strip away public health in this pandemic. Down with institutions! They’re no longer ‘relevant’, apparently. Except nobody can say what is relevant, instead. Elected, local leaders? Look at the mess they’ve made. /end