I don’t bear King Charles or the royal family ill-will. My guess is, like most of us, they’re decent human beings trying to do their best for themselves and the communities around them. William and Kate, I know, have done some valuable work around child mental health. And if people around the world find community, meaning, and pleasure in the royal family and royal celebrations then good for them. I kind of wish I did. There’s enough misery going on in the world that having something to celebrate can’t be bad for people’s psychological health.
But what I worry about is the kind of mind-set that is fostered by the coronation, the royalty, and particularly the recent invitation to ‘swear allegiance’ to the King. We’ve been invited to ‘pay homage, in heart and voice, to our undoubted King, defender of all,’ and swear, ‘true allegiance to Your Majesty, and to your heirs and successors according to law’ (see here). Personally, as a therapist, I just think, ‘What the ****’ Here’s why…
When people come to therapy, it’s rarely to do with insufficient homageness/subservience to authority, or lacking some sense of a sovereign being in their lives. That’s rarely why people suffer.
Rather, in many cases, psychological problems come down to: (1) A lack of self-esteem, and/or (2) Not feeling empowered or being assertive, and/or (3) Deferring choices to others and then not feeling that one’s life is as it should be. People who come to therapy often have a pervasive—albeit implicit—sense of powerlessness: ‘everyone else can do things but me’. So choices don’t get made, others are seen as being more responsible, clients feel that they can’t say or choose towards what they want. And then life becomes unbearably empty and dull: ‘I don’t have what I want because I’ve never felt able to try and get it.’
Here, the role of therapy, so often, is to help clients see that they do have choices. Not all choices—not that they can do whatever they want—but that they have some choices, and that within those limitations they have contingent power, they can move forward. They don’t have to rely on others to lead them and to tell them how to live their lives.
So, to me, pledging homage and subservience to royalty seems the kind of thinking and behaviour that’s associated with poorer mental wellbeing, rather than better. It’s about deferring to authority, seeing someone as better and more important than you and with some god-given right to do something that you can’t do yourself. It’s an ideology that seems to run counter to the the work that therapists do: to help people feel like they’re an equal, that they’re capable and able, that their lives are their own rather than another’s.
Therapeutic wellbeing, so often, is about helping people own and embody their power. It’s about supporting people to recognise that they are ‘adults’, that they’re responsible human beings who can (and need) to take part in the development of their communities: not expect others to do it for them: they’re ‘citizens’ rather than ‘subjects’ (as Deborah Flynn-Harland wrote in response to an earlier draft of this blog). These are people that have the capacity to take leadership: who recognise that we can all lead, and develop, and be brilliant—not just a chosen few.
As a society, we worship all kinds of celebrities. Football players, musicians, artists, business moguls. That’s probably not ideal too. But the difference is that these people, in most cases, have at least done something—we look up to them because of what they achieved and what we might not be able to do ourselves. But with the royals—or with nobility and other inherited privileges—they haven’t actually done anything special or different to earn their status. They just got born into a particular class. So when we pay homage to them, when we look up to them, we’re essentially regurgitating an ideology that says, ‘You are not as good as others just because of who they—and who you—are. You’re not as worthy because you are you.’ And what does that do to people’s psyches?
I’ve been reading Jonathan Haidt’s The righteous mind (Penguin, 2012), and it’s a brilliant book about how we develop and maintain particular moral positions. Haidt argues that a morality based around the principle of obedience to authority is just as valid as one based around principles of care or fairness. It’s an interesting and challenging argument, but I think Haidt is wrong. Care and fairness advantage multiple people, it helps to create a world in which more people can benefit more of the time (as I’ve argued in my recent book, Psychology at the heart of social change , Policy, 2023). But what does obedience to authority benefit? Perhaps it gives people a sense of security, perhaps it gives society some stability. But it has so many downsides too: inequalities, marginalisation, oppression, a lack of freedom or creativity. If obedience to authority was core to wellbeing, then why isn’t it at the heart of practices like therapy, or other wellbeing-oriented practices like social and emotional learning in schools. I can’t think of one therapeutic practices that tries to help clients be more obedient to authority as a means of fostering psychological health. I can think of hundreds that try to improve self-esteem, assertiveness, and a willingness to be ‘adult’.
Actually, having said that, there is one approach to mental wellbeing that does advocate a more hierarchical approach: positive parenting. Here, in this well-evidenced practice, you do try and encourage your children to listen to you and follow you, even if, at times, you can’t fully explain why (screams: ‘Don’t cross the road, a car is coming’). But positive parenting is what adults do with children, so it begs the question, are we children to the royals? Are we their infants and they our parents? Perhaps, psychologically, we can become so; but in a world facing climate catastrophe, war, genocide, do we need more infantalised adults? Rather, I think we need more adultified adults: who can take on responsibility, and feel that they are—and can be—the backbone for a future.
When I was a teen, I was of the ‘hang the monarchy’ persuasion. Now, I think that kind of ideology is as inhumane, destructive, and unhelpful as a pro-Royalist one. And I’m going to be having fun on Saturday: albeit at our ‘Definitely Not Celebrating the Coronation’ house party. But for all the pomp, pageantry, and ‘glamour’ of the coronation (and expense!), I really can’t see how reinforcing subservience and homaging is going to help us move in the direction of personal, social, and/or environmental wellbeing—directions we so desperately need to move in right now.
Acknowledgement
Photo by Jared Subia on Unsplash