Exit

It’s a crisp, overcast morning in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where strangers are kind and beauty is overflowing.

Harry and Meghan have escaped the Palace for Southern California. However hard the couple tried to portray (in a recent interview with Oprah) the Palace as a cult and California as reality, one could not help but get the opposite impression that California was a cult while Palace was the essential reality.

Reality is not for everyone and often has a job attached to it. Harry did not choose his job. Meghan did. Her job proved to be a poor fit for her. The job was not attached to a union. The Union was attached to the job, which proved to be not quite the same thing. Both Harry and Meghan resigned. But they have chosen not to mitigate the damage done to the Crown (and the countries with Her Majesty as the head of state), for therapeutic reasons.

Good therapy keeps the collateral damage to the world at large in check. Bad therapy encourages to fault others for one’s own insecurities. Faulting others, not least guilting them by association, rarely brings out the best in the accused and the onlookers alike and, therefore, is poor leadership. Aristocracy incapable of leadership, if only by example, is bankrupt.

The interview highlights the costs of monarchy. It causes pain to those who are born into it or walk into it. This is cruel. The returns to this cruelty are the continuity in political and spiritual leadership that spans successive governments and neglects political affiliations, and the advisory and therapeutic services rendered by Her Majesty to elected leaders. The humanity of this arrangement will continue to be discussed until the institution implodes.

Oprah leaves it to the couple to build their brand or assassinate their character. She is welcoming, respectful, and nonjudgemental. She keeps revisiting a theme until her guests feels comfortable sharing but never pressures them to say something that she knows they will later regret.

What job does not at times feel like a cult? Choose your cult wisely.

Thank you kindly.