Politics and Dharma

It is said that when Ben Franklin was sent to France as America’s first ambassador, he once played chess with the King of France. He began by removing the kings from the board, saying, “In America, we have no need for kings.”

I was personally raised in an environment so strongly anti-monarchial that it didn’t occur to me until after college to even consider that monarchy may have something valid to offer in some contexts. There are, in fact, a few problems in this country that might have been avoided if just such an arrangement of long-term oversight had been implemented. I’m not entirely convinced that the artificial distinction between powerful families and power has served us all that well.

Eleven years before Americans signed their Declaration of Independance, Gorkha King Prithvi Narayan Shah marched out of the mountains and unified the kingdoms of Kathmandu, Patan, and Bhadgaon into the nation of Nepal. He established a royal line that would rule Nepal until 2006. It had survived the British East India trading company, internal armed clashes, and the Chinese.

The mystique of the Nepalese royal family was shattered on the evening of June 1, 2001, when crown prince Dipendra shot his parents, siblings, cousins, himself, and several others. Most understand this to be rooted in a “Romeo & Juliette” style romantic conflict, where he wanted a girl from the wrong family. However, the act was, by most accounts, committed by a drunken and deranged crown prince who had been humiliated by his father during a party.

The fancy hat fell to a family member not in town for the party and only distantly in line for the throne. Consequently, he was unprepared to govern, performed exceedingly poorly, and was forced to abandon power to the Nepalese parliament in 2006. As an enticement to bring Maoist rebels back into the governmental structure, the Nepalese monarchy is slated to be entirely disbanded in 2008.

Nobody weeps for the departure of King Gyanedra, as his heavy hand cost him many allies. Six years ago, in the aftermath of the Nepalese Royal Massacre, people were in such a state of disbelief that they produced copious fantastic theories about how men masked as the crown prince had actually done the deed — complete with JFK-assassination-style conspiracy about which of the crown prince’s temples was pierced.

People like royalty. Even the fiercely anti-monarchial Americans import the British Royals for the same reason that the Royals themselves make up such an industry on the Islands. People want to relate to and identify with the identifiable richest and most powerful families they can find. Thus a monarch can act as a focus for the political and moral direction of his (or her) nation.

European nations that have retained their monarchies have frequently weathered economic and military storms of the sort that regularly crush mere republics. While monarchy is certainly not a catch-all problem solver, and brings with it many problems of its own, the built-in mechanisms in America that prevent a recurrence of monarchy have allowed family structures to dissolve from a thickly woven networks of clans to multiply-overlaid, widely-spaced filaments of arbitrarily associated individuals. 

It wasn’t all that long ago when everyone lived in extended families with long histories of intermarriage with neighboring clans. The idea that a family would distribute every mating pair and their children to different houses in different cities would have been of laughable excess, had it been imaginable. There was a time when families had economic relevance. That time came to an end when the “trust” was officially legalized as the “corporation”. And it happened in that one place that had worked so hard to eliminate the monarchy: it happened in America.

Trusts had long been illegal in Europe, and the great families worked diligently to prevent their creation — and to disband them when they were discovered! The pace of industrialization in monarchial Europe was markedly slower than in the democratic United States. Consequently, the initial dissolution of lower and middle class families, the rates of environmental pollution, and the economic imbalances caused by industrialization came slower to these countries as well. While I was raised to understand that those backwards Europeans should have embraced their future, I now wonder what else we may have lost in our rush for industrial, corporate wealth.

It’s obvious that part of the reason that the great families opposed corporate trusts is that they represented an uncontrolled pooling of resources. I think another, more basic reason that they opposed them is that trusts do not have human limitations. A Royal Family is by definition human, and human needs and concerns are always on the menu when expenditure is being considered. Corporations need only make a profit and can continue to exist long after the original board members have perished.

People want royal families to protect them and to lead industry. Even with all of the efforts made by the founding fathers, Americans have converted the winners of artistic, athletic, intellectual, and financial competitions into their first royal families. We have already seen how this social power can be converted with ease into real political power. I fully expect a form of imperial American monarchy to emerge within the next century.