A Reasoned Case for Monarchy: Return of the Kings
An Outside-The-Box Solution to Materialist Political Orthodoxy
After a number of discussions with philosophically minded individuals, it has become clear that one of the major short-comings of modern political thinking is a restriction to the materialist religions: Fascism, Communism, Liberalism. Each of which has failed in its own way through the duration of the 20th century. The best way to describe the 20th century is as the “wars of humanist religion.” Like a Greek tragedy, there is going to be no ultimate “winner” in this conflict. Having survived the 20th century conflicts, liberalism is now also breaking down under its own weight. The winners of this bizarre humanist century is going to be a few guys tangentially related to the story who show up at the last few minutes of the play. I suspect that in the United States it’ll take the form of a neo-Christendom or something that could be read as such if you squint a little.
Given that humanist religions have been a failure, particularly communism which provided a complete vision of utopia, and given the state of the modern American republic…
…let’s study actual real political alternatives. All human civilizations tend toward monarchy, democracy, or oligarchy with the last being particularly unstable.
With the failure of oligarchy and perceived-democracy, why not look to the one remaining system of governance that the humanist religions could never function under.
“We just have to get out and vote harder, we have to vote so hard this election guys. We’re going to vote so hard and if there’s enough of us and we vote hard enough we’ll just get our democracy back, just like that.”
That isn’t how it works. None of it works this way. You sound like an idiot. We keep talking about which group should vote, IQ test to vote, families to vote, men should vote…
Screw it. This whole voting thing is stupid anyway. Fuck it.
Let’s drop the pretense and discuss the third way after Democracy and Oligarchy….
Monarchy. We Serve the King.
There is no better a governance system than a benevolent dictator, but there is no guarantee that a dictator will be benevolent. Still, you can hedge your bets. To kill a kingdom, you need 3 or 4 bad kings in a row. A monarchy is a roll of the dice. To kill a democracy you need only wait 300 years. Democracies are on a timer. The following, therefore, is a reasoned case for Monarchy.
Frequently in conversation when monarchy is proposed, the response is blank stares. In the hyper-political environment of the 21st century, monarchy is a system without baggage and without pre-programmed responses from the Woke progressive midwits. Monarchy is outside the box of political discourse. Even Fascism and Communism are more accepted as they are within the purview of humanist idolatry. The core tenant of humanism is that there is no greater moral hierarchy than that of the material self, the society and the state. Ultimately humanist ideology results in a world where power is derived only from the barrel of a gun and where power is synonymous with morality. Making a claim to monarchy by-definition requires abandonment of humanist ideals and recognition of a higher moral authority than the state:
Blank-Slate Egalitarianism. A monarch is not equal to the rest of the population and is legally and/or spiritually distinct. This is true of all the nobility. In a liberal democracy this is still true of oligarchs, but the culture performatively denies it.
Universalism. Our monarch is right for our people, and presuming our type of monarchy to be correct for all peoples is silly. Claiming a liberal democracy is right for all peoples is natural under a liberal universalist worldview. “Spreading democracy” is considered a state-sanctioned ethical imperative.
Legalism. The law does not apply equally to all people in the society. There is the kings law. This is why spiritualism is necessary, to recognize the rule of the king as governed by the laws of God. Without a higher moral power than the state, there is no distinction between a king and a tyrant.
Further deviations from humanist ideology can be made, but that gets the point across. Monarchy is thus outside the box of discourse. In the United States “Monarchy is what our nation was founded on fighting against.” While true, the United States was also founded on taxation only with representation, and few Americans feel well represented when more than 30% of their paycheck is eaten by federal bureaucrats.
Of course monarchies are imperfect, but not so much as systems created by the humanist religions: Fascism failed, Communism failed, Liberalism failed. Fascism is aggressive and holds the tribe in highest esteem… meaning morality is dictated by the nation or tribe. Communism failed because it holds that the state arbitrates good and evil and that there is no greater form of moralism than service to the state. Liberalism failed because it exonerates the self and holds in high moral standing hedonism and the crumbling of its own civilization. Liberalism survived for so long because of the inertia generated by Christian religion. Once gone, liberalism holds no higher moral ideals, instead worshiping strange mutations of extremist egalitarianism.
The Study of Monarchy
A democracy or republic will descend into an oligarchy consistently after about 250 to 350 years. An oligarchy is highly unstable and prone to wild fluctuations in power dynamics in short periods of time… The fall of the Soviet Union, and Russia since, are excellent descriptors of that.
Bloodline monarchies are, however flawed, exceptionally stable over long periods of time. There have existed monarchies that last for over a thousand years in history with the same bloodline commanding a nation for generations. The stability provided by a Monarch is needed now in terms of international treaties, government policies, and oversight of the body politic. A republic falls apart due the creation of an entrenched, but unstable political class. A monarchy has an entrenched political class, but a stable one that doesn’t need to justify its position through the exercise of force or falsified election results.
It was observed in the book “The New Cold War” by Robin Niblett that all governments need a cultural claim to legitimacy. While much of the text is highly outdated in light of post-2020 international geo-strategic and economic interests, this requirement for a claim to legitimacy should be given specific attention.
Most of modern government legitimacy descends from the philosophical work of John Locke and John Milton. Where it is the consent of the governed that provides government with a mandate to rule.
In a democracy, legitimacy is claimed through popular vote. Similarly in republics through the popular vote of representatives. Elections result in a regular changing-of-the-guard among the political class with the losers of the election well aware that they’ll have another chance in a few years to try again. In single-party nations like China (let’s just call them fascist as they effectively are fascist) the single ruling party regularly changes guard every decade or two as the elders of the party retire and the up-and-coming youngsters take positions of power. These shifts in power and influence are absolutely critical to retain legitimacy as it indicates to the population that their voices are valuable in government in affairs.
In an oligarchy, the type which the United States has effectively become, the changing of the guard begins to break down. This is because the losers of the election are not guaranteed that they will have another fair shot in a few years. Election tampering, unfathomable amounts of political spending, forced mass-migration and big-tech corporate tampering have all made it difficult for the population to trust the results of the election. Oligarchies are naturally unstable and prone to coups and bouts of violent dispute.
The perceived legitimacy required for a government produces a sense that government actions are justified. In the 20th century this took the image of some how being the will of the people. Voting, Propaganda, and Secret Police all work to instill in the population the idea that it is the will of the people being served, not the will of the ruler. Especially when it is in fact, not the will of the people.
Elections are so messy, because (regardless of result) they must be considered the will of the people in the eyes of the majority population. That is why even mono-states like Venezuela put on the show of hosting an election, because if it isn’t the will of the people then order breaks down. That is the legacy of humanist religions.
Historically, monarchies are not bound in this way. The King was not historically seen as the will of the people, but as the sole leader. Our king. That is why it’s not taken seriously as a modern political system, because it drops the performative legitimacy of humanist governance and invokes a higher power. God chose the King. The pomp and ceremony of a coronation and the décor of the Kings Guard are the cultural claim to legitimacy; not a falsified election or meandering rhetoric about the will of the people.
Precedence
There are several nations in the world that operate effectively under a monarchy: Saudi Arabia. Thailand. Oman. Not monarchies-in-name-only like the United Kingdom or Sweden which have royal figureheads bound by the will of a local parliament, actual real will-of-the-king monarchies.
Those nations have developed social codes and systems very different from the egalitarian humanist states of the rest of the world; most have navigated global affairs more effectively than states that claim to be democratic. The wealth of the kingdom is the wealth of the king making his interests directly tied to the interests of the nation unlike similar figures in parliamentary or oligarchic systems. Obviously a monarchy can function in the modern world and can behave effectively on the world stage. The question is whether or not a monarchy can be created which curbs its worst aspects, improves the quality of life of the people and presents itself well on the world stage.
How are the flaws of a monarchy in comparison to an oligarchic republic?
How would a proper modern monarchy be structured?
How could one be adapted into a western nation?
How could the people of a modern nation-state adopt a monarchy?
Why A Monarchy Could Work Better
Many of the critiques of a modern monarchy are just as much critiques of the modern world in general. The benefit is that a structured feudal monarchy could actually function substantially more efficiently than a modern managerial state… or at least express no greater flaws than the managerial state. A holistic monarchy might solve numerous issues that now seem intractable.
Scale
It is necessary to address the fact that monarchies (like democracies) are limited in effective scale. A nation of a billion people under a single king isn’t going to work well as the king rules over many disparate cultures. Fortunately, feudal systems can be utilized here. Kings don’t exist alone, you have the King, the Duke, the Earl, the Count, the Baron and the Baronet. Each bound to their territory and each with a degree of liberty regarding how to rule it.
The United States and the Holy Roman Empire both solve the same problem by scaling down the size of each state. An emperor above the kings, and the king above his dukes, etc. The United States is a federation of states. The difference is that the managerial class really likes centralizing power and that’s very easy to do in an oligarchic republic. In a monarchy (or empire) each of the nobles seek decentralization and localization. Allowing the emperor to dictate micro-policy to each count individually effectively forces them to become nothing more than local figureheads, robbing them of their lineage and influence. In a monarchy the actors for each locality are philosophically at odds with centralization while in a democracy it’s in the interests of the mid-level bureaucrats to avoid responsibility by centralizing power to a higher authority.
“I’m sorry sir, that’s against policy” is much more hollow than “By the will of the duke that is not how we do things here.” One statement passes responsibility up the chain of bureaucracy to some faceless midlevel manager interpreting policy and legislative action. The other enunciates a specific leader who demands deference.
A system of distributed Monarchs, each of whom is bound to their own territory will create an environment far more similar to the original constitutional republic than any other proposed governance system. An overzealous emperor is more likely to be overthrown and replaced than an overzealous president. It’s easy to keep several hundred million people fighting amongst themselves; much harder to get 50 monarchs who are secure in their lineage to go to war with each other. The proposal for the United States is that each state should have its own king.
Elections
Needless to say that monarchies don’t have national presidential elections. While it’s likely that there’d be local elections for sheriffs, or even a house of commons in each state, there’ll also be, the monarch. Who is not elected, and who does not require the false legitimacy of elections to retain power. The nobility won’t have to put on a show every few years during an election cycle.
That’s billions of dollars not-spent on the election cycle which can be put towards actually economically productive public works. Even more, unfathomable amounts of wealth expended on propaganda to maintain the perceived electoral legitimacy may also be saved. It means that citizens may bitch about the king, but they’re no longer at each others throats over petty politics.
Theoretically a hybrid system of representative monarchy could be applied: the children of the King being subject to a popular election (or an electoral college) upon the death (or retirement) of the king.
Education
One of the greatest flaws of parliamentary and democratic states is general education. We live in a time where the collective knowledge of mankind is at our fingertips yet the school system trains children to be factory workers as if the year were 1940. The modern education system is a century out of date.
Many of our elite leaders are shuffled through the same school system. They aren’t trained in civics, violence or governance. They’re trained to be factory workers in factories that no longer exist. If lucky, they’re trained in entrepreneurship and future-skills. Maybe they go to college for law or medicine. Ultimately, little training in leadership. Stoic philosophy, the histories of Charlemagne and The Prince are all books woefully lacking from what future leaders read.
In a Monarchy, the leadership class (the nobility) is a known-quantity. The children of the nobility must be trained to be nobles. Especially true in a representative monarchy where the offspring of each noble competes for their fathers seat in a local election once a generation; an impetus to not-be-a-bastard and competition to be the best out of their siblings in the eyes of the population. In any case, the children of the nobility will be trained from birth in economics, law, and most importantly leadership. The competition for the nobility will be each other. There will be significant pressure to create and be the best leaders… which will improve the quality of life of the general population.
Humanist egalitarianism and legal universalism indicate that the entire population should have an equal shot at success (untrue, but still paid lip service in acts of cultural performance art). Monarchy drops that. No (or limited) elections means there is no need to waste time with hyper-generalist educations.
It is in the interest of the nobility to provide education to their populations as required for what those populations actually do. A noble with a big mine in his county will have a mining school. A noble with an aerospace manufacturer in his territory will have an engineering school. It will be in the interests of the nobility (and the civilian populace alike) to train the next generation in the skills that are actually useful for the place they live in. Especially in a modern monarchy with internet access, there’s no reason to train generalized skills. Those who want a general education can easily receive it digitally and do so without wasting every ones time for years in public school and more years at the university level. Thus citizens are given real future rather than a vaguely meandering “get the degree, get the job, it’s easy just give ‘em a firm handshake.” Nobles will know what their territory requires in terms of workers, and aim education at that. “Go be whatever you’re passionate about” has only led to a gigantic over-educated underclass in the modern oligarchic republic.
The general population may be trained in a focused fashion on specific necessary trades and skills; taken on as apprentices, rather than subjected to the egg-headed mess that is the modern public education system operated by bureaucrats and policy-interpreters.
Individual Rights via Self Interested Competition
It’s simple to say “let’s just have a constitution” when it comes to retaining individual rights in a monarchy. That said, it’s the same level of simplicity with which people say that about democracies and republics. Rather it’s important to examine why it would be beneficial to the nobility to maintain individual rights and liberties under a semi-constitutional framework. How do the interests play out? It’s obvious that in a managerial bureaucracy the fewer rights citizens hold, the easier it is to categorize them into spreadsheets… this is why bureaucratic systems like the soviet union leaned toward eliminating virtually all “individual rights”: easier oversight of… everything. The managerial class of liberal democracies would do the same were it not at odds with the hyper-individualist mythology of liberalism.
In a modern monarchy a constitution and a high-court (of which the King is a member) will absolutely be necessary. It will also be necessary to align the interests of the nobility toward individual rights. Modern politicians spout off about freedoms all day, but do so as showmanship to gain votes. For nobles and politicians alike, the real question is “what have I to gain?” keeping in mind that they’re secure in their seat of power, secure in their lineage, and secure in their territory (baring wars and succession crises).
The answer is embedded in the question: the lineage, the throne, the territory. A count or baron is bound to those three things. Importantly, the territory but not the people. Suppose that the nobility are bound to their territory, but their citizenry are unbounded. Unlike a modern managerial corporation, the noble cannot up and relocate to another city after creating an ecological disaster. A noble cannot behave like a Californian mayor and fill a city with homeless criminals for 3 years before moving to a cozy gated suburb. The Duke must live with the consequences of his actions, and his children must live with the consequences of his actions.
With the nobility bound to the land, and the citizenry unbounded, a sort of free-market of leadership is created. For the citizen, it’s hard to pick up and move from one county to another. For the noble who holds sway in the region, it’s impossible. This cultural free-market of leadership becomes the basis for economic freedom, individual liberties and wise ecological governance. Destroying the ecology of a county or barony for a fifty million dollars in tax revenue isn’t as enticing a prospect when you know that your lineage will have to continue living in that place for centuries.
Similarly, a citizen will think twice about moving into a territory owned by a notoriously tyrannical noble. “Sure the job might pay well, but that guy has a tendency to pick people off the street and attempt to seize their property. Think I’ll pass.” We already see this sort of behavior in the oligarchic republic today. There are people who refuse to live in the state of Colorado due to their firearms laws. There’s people who don’t want to move to California due to the tax rates. Only instead of some vague “the laws and policies forced on us by mid-level managers aren’t what I agree with” it’s specific. “That noble does things I don’t like, I don’t trust him, I won’t work in that county.” It also becomes more localized, containing the problems so they don’t spill over into neighboring counties or dukedoms.
Simply put, a monarchy and modern nobility force leaders to take responsibility for their policies and actions in the long-term.
Individual Rights and the Noble Succession
Succession becomes very important for the noble classes in society. It is generally guaranteed by blood or higher levels of the nobility. A duke may step in to fill a seat left vacant by a retired or dead count with no kids. For the most part, succession is according to familial ties and bloodlines thereby securing the positions of the nobles; allowing long-term multigenerational planning for the future.
An effect of the formalized system of noble succession is that regular run-of-the-mill citizens are not eligible for leadership positions. They’re not going to ascend to the status of a noble, nor are they a threat to the overall governance system. In so being, the amount of personal autonomy in a monarchy for the citizenry exceeds that seen in most democracies and republics. Citizens aren’t a threat, so you don’t need to wire-tap their conversations. Citizens aren’t going to overthrow the government with a populist elected figure, so there’s no need to throw random citizens in prison forever because they entered the wrong building in the capital.
In comparison to the totalitarian governance systems of humanism, monarchies are mild. Even liberalism has a tendency towards universal surveillance while fascism and communism move straight through that into thought control. Other nobles are a threat to the system and the body-politic, so they’ll be surveilled and carefully watched by each other. That’s okay. They’re a different legal class of person. There’s no need for legal universalism: nobles are a potential threat and thus surveilled and guarded more heavily. Citizens are a free class that can mostly be left to their own devices. Foreigners are kept at arms length until integrated into the local culture.
Distinction between the nobles and the citizens in a legal sense actually creates cause for additional personal liberty. If the nobility are classified as the primary threats to the monarch in terms of war and succession, then the citizenry can mostly be left alone. Wouldn’t that be nice?
The Sons of the King
As the noble birthright is passed down by blood, the children of the nobility are the only ones eligible to take up the mantle of their father. Frequently intermarriage between noble families creates tangled webs of familial ties and formal alliances. Managing the succession of the nobles without creating new titles or subdividing lands becomes a tricky prospect.
Perhaps we bring back elections here? When the king dies or retires, why not choose the next king via electoral college or popular vote from the population? This may be effective as the goal is to get a good king for the next generation, not to get a few more tax rebates over a 4 year election cycle.
A snap election within a week or two of the monarchs passing would prevent campaigning from the children of the king. Instead, they’d have to spend their lives prior to that moment proving themselves to the populace. It’s a lot easier to run a 1 year electoral campaign than it is to not-be-a-bastard for 30 years before your father dies or retires. In such a system each population would vote for their local noble out of the options available from the nobles’ bloodline: the Barons’ children, the Counts’ children, the Dukes’ Children and the Kings’. This system preserves a degree of representation (and solves much of the succession problem) while also retaining a core lineage in leadership.
An electoral method has the benefit that those siblings who are not chosen for the role lose their titles and become regular citizens. Nepotism will keep them from being homeless, but the result is a continuous cycling of the noble classes into the general populace drawing contacts and resource with them. It will also prevent subdivisions of territory as one noble divides an estate among multiple children until they’re no more than glorified landlords. Each county a single count, each barony a single baron. This will build strong competition between the children of the nobility… and ultimately that’s a good thing for society.
Codes of honor will develop in response to social pressure. Duels are likely and combat training for the children of the elite will become standard. Each child of each noble will seek to outdo one another; be the most regal, the most honorable, the best potential leader in the eyes of the population. By the time their father dies these habits will have ingrained themselves in the child over 30 years. Resentful brothers might fight with one another, but those engagements will be restricted to the nobility. The general citizenry is not a threat to the line of succession, only other nobles after all. So the duels and feuds are kept local and small rather than spilling into national politics.
A Bad King
A bad tyrannical king is one of the largest problems in a Monarchy. While a republic is on a clock from the moment of its inception, and a democracy is on clock running at double speed, a monarchy is a dice roll. Eventually you’ll come up with a loss. Three losses in a row and you lose the kingdom. Several bad kings will destroy a kingdom, so what is the mechanism for replacing a king?
Like all governance systems, one can’t presume that a monarchy will last forever. It is silly to presume a republic will last forever too. No mechanism really exists to ‘fix’ a liberal democracy. Fixing a modern democracy requires not only replacing the president, but the entire structure of the bureaucratic managerial state.
Replacing a king is akin to replacing the state.
When it comes to a bad count or duke, one that has abused their power through nepotism and arbitrarily attacked their citizens, a citizen takes it to the Kings Court to file grievance. When the king is bad, there is no higher court. Just like when a republic or democracy becomes corrupt and decadent, there is unlikely to be a peaceful solution. A president can be replaced, a bureaucratic state cannot simply be removed and replaced with a different bureaucratic state. It’s likely violence will be inevitable at that stage of the monarchy.
The goal is not to prevent violent ascension of a new king, it is to restrict the resultant clashes to the capital and the noble class. A civil war in a democracy employs millions of citizens in combat. A civil war in a monarchy is a coup d'état of the king in the capital performed by a bunch of pissed off nobles. Part of the constitutionality, therefore, must be the right of the nobility to keep and draw their own militias and spec-ops teams. The king may draw the banners of his loyal nobility in times of war, but it is the responsibility of the nobility to maintain their own county level forces.
In this way the king is beholden to his nobles in the same way the federal government was supposed to remain beholden to the states. Unlike the bureaucratic central authority of the federal government, the nobility are driven towards additional autonomy. This makes a succession crisis limited to a problem among the nobility rather than a problem for the citizenry. If the nobility is equipped independently, the central monarch has no choice but to at least partially listen to their demands. Sure the house of commons make draft legislation, and the house of lords may approve it and the king may sign it (no prime minister or president, only the king). It is the nobility, however, that must enforce it, and it is the nobility to whom the king must most carefully pay attention. This does not eliminate the possibility of collapse. Rather, the nobility are equipped with the tools needed to replace a bad king and not-destroy the entire kingdom in a gigantic civil war when doing so.
Responsibility
A specific noble singling out a citizen here or there to mess with for arbitrary reasons is a real risk. The Count just doesn’t like John the plumber, so Johns business is going to be taxed, his buildings will be declared not-to-code, and he’ll eventually be driven out. This is something that could be a problem in a monarchy. It already is a problem in the bureaucracy of an oligarchic republic. Rather, instead of it being the Count causing problems for John the plumber, it is some faceless bureaucrat.
Consider an alternate scenario: Henson is the vice-director of city waterworks inspections and Hensons sister complained that she didn’t like John. Henson will levy the full incompetency of the city bureaucracy to make Johns livelihood impossible, sending the most hard-liner inspectors to review Johns work, accidently losing some of Johns permits, and recommending the local assessor re-evaluate Johns house for taxing purpose.
Those two scenarios represent the same problem with a key distinction. If the local Count decides to make Johns life harder, John knows who’s doing it and can sell his business and leave town. If the local mid-level bureaucrat does it, John doesn’t realize he’s being targeted until he’s already months behind and in a fiscal hole. The responsibility of the local nobility and monarch for their own actions is one of the key benefits of a modern monarchy. It is not ‘the city’ that has ruined Johns business, it is the Count who has told John that he should get the hell out of his county. If John doesn’t like it, he can appeal it up the chain to the court of the Duke. In a managerial bureaucracy John is screwed and the best he can hope for is spending a tremendous amount of capital taking the city to court… over and over and over… because some one some where keeps hitting him with false inspection violations. John can never take that vice-director of city waterworks to court directly.
The benefits of this are two-fold. First is accountability for the rulers, and the second is the elimination of overhead cost in managing a county, city or barony. The buck stops with the noble. When a building falls because it wasn’t to code it is not only the fault of the builder, but also the local noble in not calling the builder out. When a water main breaks it is the local baron who has to pay to fix it and it is the local baron who needs to be guaranteed it works. He doesn’t want a new water main that’ll work until the end of his term in office, his office is lifetime. He wants a new water main that’ll still work when his grandson is running the barony.
When a building burns to the ground because the electrical shorted out… it’ll be the electricians head that rolls otherwise it’d be the barons. The result is long-term city planning and tradesmen who take pride in their work. They’re not there for a paycheck, they’re there to prove to the local nobility that they can do the job well. Much of the managerial overhead in local government is founded on legal universalism. We’ve dropped that. It is now on the head of the local baron or count to make sure that the people putting structures up won’t have them come tumbling down.
The overhead cost of management dwindles dramatically when it’s in every ones best interests to do their jobs well. It’s in the best interests of the ruling noble to ensure that the jobs are done well. Fewer inspections, fewer vehicle registrations, emissions testing, parks and rec, even many of the law-enforcement activities can be reduced dramatically because enforcement is native to the system. Complaining about your neighbors kids playing unsupervised in the Counts court will be a waste of time. Doing enough property damage that it attracts the ire of the Sheriff and the counts guard will be an immediately dangerous problem. “Don’t be a dick, and be responsible,” far from a nice sentiment will become the majority of the law.
Overhead is cheaper, enforcement is easier, nosey Karen’s are ignored for the betterment of the community. It does require giving up legal universalism, but far from shackling people to arbitrary systems, doing so frees them from needless and extraneous bureaucratic micro-management.
A modern monarchy creates an environment where men are responsible for themselves and their families in the eyes of the Law and the society. From the poorest mechanic to the king himself… because if things really do go badly and the kingdom begins to collapse, every one knows whose head it is that’s going into the guillotine.
Morality
A monarch derives His mandate from the consent of the governed, both the citizenry and the nobility. On a cultural level, however, the monarch derives his mandate from divine inspiration and a higher power. It is by the will of God or by divine destiny that this specific family was presented with the responsibility of rulership. That creates a key distinction in the nature of the state that humanist governance systems do not have. The idea that there is a higher moral arbiter than the king is implicit in monarchal systems.
A humanist governance system, be it liberal or fascist or communist, is founded on materialism. Thus morality is restricted to the material conditions and the rule of the state… i.e. what is good for the state is treated as an inherent moral good. With a monarchy, legitimacy stems from the cultural claim that the monarch has a divine mandate. There is therefore a higher moral code than the rule of the king or the rule of the state. In so being, it is possible for the church, the nobility, and the citizenry to hole the state to account when it stretches beyond the bonds of moral behavior. This reproach, while subtle, is what created the Code Duello, and the Chivalric traditions. There is a moral mandate to the state inherent in the monarchs divine right to rule.
Inevitability
Far from being the creation of a violent tyranny, monarchies offer the population greater personal freedom than a modern oligarchic republic. A monarchy is not a perfect standard for governance, but no system is. What a monarchy can do is reign in the bloated managerial class of modern nations, replacing them with localized governance through feudal nobility. If a monarchy is implemented by intent it can serve as a soft-landing for the corrupt republics of modern western nations.
If a critical collapse happens prior to the implementation of a politically effective alternative system, it’s very likely that the combination of corporate power and state overreach will be utilized to create truly horrifying tyrannies. Those types of oligarchies can last for a long time before they collapse into warlords and local rule… which end in something approximating a monarchy.
The real risk is not mere corporate oligarchy, it is a global mega-corporate-oligarchy. Tyrannies that utilize AI to police the thoughts of citizens and hordes of possessed simpletons to enforce bizarre social engineering enterprises. The future of the West doesn’t look good if alternative governance methods cannot be developed and implemented. Monarchies are an option, a real alternative to digital managerialism which is achieved by ceding power to responsible individuals rather than feckless corrupt legislators and faceless bureaucratic drones.
I’ll be making another post in the future for paid subscribers on how to actually implement a modern monarchy in a western nation or state.
Democratic sentiments are an artificial construct which did not ever manifest itself prior to the 18th century in anything greater than a localized area, the wish for order, safety and competency however is a natural yearning of any man who wishes to live a proper diligent and dignified life, it is no wonder then, that monarchies lasted millennia while republics are on their way out.
Brilliant essay, I must admit I've begun to consider Monarchism as the only solution to the current global managerial mess we're all in. A monarch is by nature forced to look to those beneath him for aid, support, clerks, warriors and so on.
I must admit I've been looking at Chivalry & Bushido this past year and must agree that Kingship and Chevalerie feels more natural and feels more pragmatic by nature.