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Disgraced Andrew insists royal staff call him 'sir' and fetch beer (www.youtube.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world
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[–] 5 points 8 months ago (9 children)

I heard a very interesting argument that if the Royal family can remove Andrew from the line of succession, then the line itself can be manipulated, and anyone else could be added. In that case, what is the point of having a royal family?

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    The line has been manipulated several times by Parliament, including the selection and elimination of kings.

    The point of the royal family now isn't to be a defined lineage, but an agreed upon vessel to hold power when Parliament temporarily breaks. Even then, Queen Elizabeth II was kind of shit at it.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    Not to mention that the current royal family was originally named Saxe-Coburg, changing it to a more palatable "Windsor" during the first World war (which was fought against subjects of the German Kaiser, who was a cousin of the British king).

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    Seems a little threadbare as a theory.

    People have been adding other people to royal families for the entirety of recorded history.

    Sometimes its through marriage, but sometimes its adoption, sometimes they just make up a lineage.

    Now, theres arguments against royalty, for sure, but if the royal family wasn't allowed to prune itself, find the best people and merge them into the royal family, etc, there never would've been royals in the first place. Royal families begin with individuals but they remain by caring about "good breeding" (and other ways of consolidating power).

    Consolidating is the real purpose. It can be obscured with religious lines of divinity, or what have you, but royal families are always shopping for people to incorporate.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    A lot of people have a tendency to want to show loyalty to their country by showing subservience to some rich arrogant asshole that surrounds themselves with gold. See the how a significant percentage of the US population think of Trump for example.

    If there is no King the subservient portion of the population will create one. It's better to have a King that doesn't have any actual power so that won't happen. The subservient part of the population don't really care that their King has no political power, they just want to bow to someone to prove their loyalty to the country and see some pomp and pageantry. For a lot of people the concept of a country is too abstract to understand so they need some person to do all kinds the ceremonial stuff so they can express their loyalty to the country by showing loyalty to that person.

    Similar to how having a separation between government and religion, it's a separation between government and all the ceremonial pomp and pageantry stuff.

    Sure, I wouldn't directly care if there was monarchy was eliminated, but a lot of other people would. And those people would start voting in some wealthy asshole to rule over us like a king. And that's something I definitely don't want. So just give the subservient types someone they can bow to so it doesn't impact the rest of us.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    A monarchy is a family business. Anyone in the family can run it. Monarchies are inherently unstable when the monarchs die because of this.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    Authoritarian forms of government will be unstable when there's no clear line of succession. It's the reason why monarchies come about. It's not like people don't understand that it's extremely arbitrary, it's just that it's better than the alternative: civil wars whenever whoever is in power dies. It's an agreement among various lords that it's better they just accept that person over there that's the son of the King will someday be King rather than having a civil war when the King dies.

    And sure civil wars would still happen, but most of the time the succession would happen without bloodshed. When there's no line of succession, it's just constant power struggles when the leader dies.

    Of course democracy is a far better way to determine who will run things, but that requires a literate population to work. Which didn't exist throughout much of human history. Sure, there were republics throughout history, but they'd usually become monarchies when the illiterate masses would decide they liked that Julius guy (he threw the best parties!) and hated that Brutus guy who killed him, even if the Julius guy was becoming a tyrant.

    So monarchies suck, but they're better than civil wars. So when the population becomes too dumb, it sucks, but it's better than the alternatives.

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