Mythologizing power perpetuates conservative politics and social inequality

Our long-time Queen has left us for the long journey that has no return. Now, old England has a King again. As the Prince of Wales and hair to the throne, King Charles was known to have “green” leanings. In the role of the king, he will probably have to go back to pure blue.

Since Queen Elizabeth’s departure – may she rest in peace – we have heard an incredible number of exaggerations from the BBC and the other mass media and also the social media about the personality and reign of our deceased Queen.

We have heard so many gross exaggerations, we could compile an encyclopaedia of personality cult exaggerations. Even the Queen herself would probably be embarrassed to hear them.

We live in a country where power is being mythologized. Royal mythology is the stupidity fodder for the British people. The mythologization of power is an essential element of every hegemonic ideology.

The people love the royal myths and thereby accept the system that makes them poor and keeps them in the margins of the political process. There are many people who live in poverty but worship the royal family.

The personality cult of the king or queen is cultivated and exploited by the political elite to “legitimize” themselves in the form of “His Majesty’s Government” and “His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition” (also called “Official Opposition”).

Therefore, there is a political elite consisting of the two major parties who alternate in government. Most of the time everybody else is excluded. The election system also helps to exclude all other political groups/parties from government.

Whenever the Labour Party has a socialist leadership, the establishment and the mass media that serve it, make sure they fail in the elections. If they win, they are prevented from implementing their socialist policies.

Therefore, the two major parties can be in government only as managers of capitalism and servants of the ancient regime of deference and inequality.

That’s the political system that perpetuates social inequality, the system that makes sure that inequality looks “natural” in the eyes of the poor people, the system that makes sure real social change will never happen.

The monarch appoints the leader of the winning party as prime minister and reads the king’s speech at the opening of parliament. He has no right to express his own views. “His” speech is written by the government. Thus, the monarch and the political elite legitimise each other and each other’s privileges.

The monarchy is the English/British way of mythologizing power. Royal families, the world over, exist because of a long-standing human need to mythologize power. The second you put someone or something on a pedestal it creates a default sense of order.  

Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, once said in an interview: “Relations of power are not in themselves forms of repression. But what happens is that, in society, in most societies, organizations are created to freeze the relations of power, hold those relations in a state of asymmetry, so that a certain number of persons get an advantage, socially, economically, politically, institutionally, etc.   And this totally freezes the situation.  That’s what one calls power in the strict sense of the term: it’s a specific type of power relation that has been institutionalized, frozen, immobilized, to the profit of some and to the detriment of others.”

What we have been watching on our television screens after the death of Queen Elizabeth leaves no doubt that we live in frozen history. Very lucky for Liz Truss, the new right-wing Tory prime minister.

People have forgotten their real problems, the fact that the NHS is in a dire state, the astronomical energy bills, the rising cost of living. The period of mourning and the funeral of the Queen will be followed by the ecstatic rituals of succession and coronation. What an escape from reality.