Have you read Terry Pratchett? I suppose you could call him Sir Terry Pratchett in fact, but one of his characters would say that one of the design flaws of humanity is the bend in the knee. It's like someone left a coding error in their brains that says, "Kings, what a good idea".
I'm paraphrasing, but barely. Your comment just reminded me of that.
I’ve been thinking about that on my own lately. It’s like the whole human race has imposter syndrome and thinks there needs to be an “adult” in the room.
I don’t know how many parents feel this way when bringing their first-born home from the hospital, but my spouse and I felt like the doctors were crazy to trust us, a couple of twenty-somethings, to take home a child and actually keep it alive and do all the things adults do for children.
Maybe that was wise of us to realize the level of our inexperience, but I think that feeling of inadequacy applies to most humans in many situations. We look for leaders to follow, intellectuals to learn from, heroes to worship, and monarchs to rule us. Otherwise, who is the adult in the room?
On taking custody of small humans, I like to say that if we weren’t able to make them at home ourselves we would definitely need a license to get one. It is illegal to own most other types of ape.
As i see it a monarch can have (or not have) an element of personal charisma. People liked Elizabeth. Commonwealth countries were not going to take her image off their currency and honor indigenous people instead but when it came to changing the money to honor Charles or honor indigenous people that’s another thing.
When I was younger I saw the Charles-Diana-Camilla triangle through the “it’s so awful to have to marry someone you don’t love” lens but today I see it as a lost opportunity for the monarchy if not the UK. There is very little choice about who’s going to inherit the monarchy (can’t select for ‘much better than average’) but you can pick somebody much better than average to marry into the family, and thus keep people interested in and emotionally connected with the monarchy, which is what it is all about. If people don’t care sooner or later it will become irrelevant and/or die out, if it cultivates that connection it can thrive.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens at some point. Every revolution targets the problems of the day. Over time, people forget the problems of the past and start to focus on current day problems. Current day problems relate to the current day government system, and problems are blamed on the current system (right or wrong).
If we completely ignore what we’ve learned about monarchy historically, and just think about whether it could address some problems of today (e.g. lack of leadership accountability, manipulation of public opinion to steer voting, the divisiveness of every person having to think about politics, etc), I can see some appealing elements.
I'm paraphrasing, but barely. Your comment just reminded me of that.