Temperance enjoying a Frugal Meal, 1792 [Gillray (James) Archive, JG/2/12]

“Societies perish, like men, when they arrive at that stage of senile madness where they are no longer capable of doubting their own gods." - Emil Cioran

The continuing woes of the House of Windsor, specifically the transatlantic grievances of its erstwhile scion, Prince Harry, offer less a poignant drama of familial fracture and more a wretched illustration of a fundamental societal malady: the enduring, inexplicable reverence for inherited status. This latest episode, concerning the granular details of his security arrangements, serves as yet another data point in the irrefutable (I mean, clearly and sensibly refutable, not nostalgic, spinelessly tongue-hanging and needy pleas to satiate an imagined need for national branding, refutable) argument for the immediate and irreversible obsolescence of the mad maze of the monarchy.

The psychological architecture underpinning this enduring fascination is particularly execrable. It speaks to a chronic, almost parasexual yearning for hierarchy, a vicarious participation in a drama of supposed grandeur that neatly distracts from the mundane realities of what passes for existence. The suburban curtain twitches not out of genuine concern, but from a morbid curiosity, a need to locate oneself within a pre-ordained social order, even if one’s position is several rungs below the rung containing the perversely cruel birdcage. This collective absorption in the minutiae of royal lives is a form of mass psychogenic illness, a willing suspension of disbelief in the face of demonstrable irrationality.

But the pitiful neighbourhood watch and the fervent online debates over HRH's latest tribulations are merely symptoms of a deeper, more insidious societal malaise. To willingly deny the inherent absurdity of monarchy is to participate in a fundamental act of self-deception, a primal surrender to the comforting lie of preordained order. It speaks to a profound lack of faith in the messy, unpredictable dynamism of true exceptionalism, a fear of the vertiginous freedom that comes with dismantling inherited hierarchies. This clinging to the familiar, however asymmetrically formed, echoes humanity's long and often tragic history of embracing dogma over doubt, of kneeling before idols forged from tradition and fear. To accept the tenet that one family is inherently more deserving of our attention and resources, solely by virtue of their lineage, is a symbolic endorsement of every injustice that has ever plagued human civilization. It is the ghost of Nimrod whispering in the iPhone ear, the magic trick of every tyrant who ever claimed divine right. It represents a fundamental failure of imagination, a crippling inability to envision a social fabric woven from the threads of genuine merit and mutual respect, rather than the brittle gold of inherited privilege.