My book club read the biography of Queen Noor of Jordan (meh) and it got me thinking about royalty and how deeply weird it is.
Queen Noor is an American woman who married King Hussein of Jordan and who unironically name-drops her dear friends, kings and queens and princesses from other nations, who, even overthrown and in exile, still have mansions and jewels and host lovely tea parties.
There are at present tracking, (according to Wikipedia), 43 sovereign states with a monarch as a head of state—with King Charles as king to 15 of those states, which is a surprising number of royals for 2025. The idea that some people’s bloodline is so special that these “royal” people are entitled to enjoy chateaux and staff and immunity from prosecution for all manner of dodgy or illegal behaviour is so dubious. Not to mention the presumption that might qualify them to be the head of a state.
The crux of the weirdness, for me, is in the honorific title of “Your Highness” or “Your Majesty.”
Your highness is a curious way to address a five-foot-something inbred human of dubious intelligence or mental stability. No one else in the world is known as “your lowness,” “your grooviness,” “your beardedness” or “your wittiness”—it’s clearly a linguistic relic from the early ages of the pre-dictionary.
There is an entity that invokes the phrase “your majesty” in my mind… and it is a 200-foot-tall cottonwood tree. This tree is behind my house, and I like to visit her. When I imagine greeting this tree, it doesn’t feel right to say “hello mate,” or “hello lovely,” or any of the ways I might greet a friend… What comes to my tongue is consistently the word majesty: “Hello, your majesty.” I can’t shake free of this word. It arises, it fits.
Majesty. It seems so apt when I admire the huge trunk, rippled bark like ancient elephant skin, cloaked in moss like a green velvet gown, the ground nest of bees that float up from near one partly exposed root. I’ve made muscle balm from the resin from her dropped buds. When I crane my head back to look up at her crown, “wow, your highness” is just a statement of fact. It makes me laugh to wonder who was the short little long-ago man who had the audacity to squeak-lisp, “No! you must call ME your highness! I am the highness from now on and forever.” (But you’re so clearly a tosser and a pretender in a big chair. Why ever would we? A) Well because I will beat and starve you and cut off your payments and steal your personal information if you don’t.)
History repeats itself. Now, just across the border, and eating up all the air in all the rooms, there is a handful of new candidates for the crowns of Your Tosserness, Your Fakeness and Your Unworthiness, proclaiming themselves to be so exalted and exceptional as to warrant bequeathing their questionable gene pool on far too many spawn, and remaking a new techno-feudal system with themselves at the helm.
As shared by investigative journalist Dave Troy, this is actually a neo-monarchy bid that is underway. “Musk’s rapid takeover of federal infrastructure mirrors the broader ambitions of the neoreactionary (NRx) movement—a small group of Silicon Valley elites who reject democracy and seek to install a “CEO Monarch” to rule by technological and financial dominance. This network includes Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, David Sacks, and Curtis Yarvin, among others. Once considered fringe, purveyors of this ideology have now been embedded into the core of government operations.”
There’s always someone who wants the big chair and to be able to utter “off with their heads” with impunity, am I right? The divine right of kings was a doctrine that asserts that kings took their authority from God and therefore could not be held accountable by anyone on Earth. It’s a ludicrous idea that entrenched the power and authority of an endless succession of nut-bars and incompetents until a series of revolutions put that to rest. And it is the very opposite of “human rights.” There are no human rights, no individual rights, when someone’s authority is unquestionable, absolute and subject to no checks and balances. But here we are watching slack-jawed as a coup unfolds and players unravel all the checks and balances, unmaking laws that went through due process, with the stroke of a (probably fake) pen. And some people still feel a kind of worship towards them.
The philosopher Pascal once alluded to the idea that humans have a God-shaped hole inside us. We will fill it with anything and everything. I think actually we have a nature-connection hole inside us. A “majesty”-shaped hole. Consider it. Notice it. Interrogate it. I’d argue it’s a yearning for majesty and sovereignty-proximity, which manifests as celebrity adulation, or a love affair with royals, or strong-man leaders, or a weird addiction to political dynasties, or a sense that maybe a strong hand at the wheel will steer the ship right. It won’t. Power unchecked becomes monstrous and always has. It is a seductive illusion, when compared to the mess and brawl of democracy, but it’s an illusion.
When we let them amass all the power, concentrate it, and grow it, they’re going to use it. And all their pathologies will run rampant. On the rest of us, regular-blooded beings.
Let us resist the urge to fill a natural longing for majesty with the powerful and those who laugh in the face of common courtesy or rules, as if blessed by some divine right. As historians of authoritarianism and brave journalists are telling us—your joy matters, community matters, refusing to obey in advance matters, vigilance matters. God save us from kings and king wannabes. Go find true majesty and ordinary courage and proclaim it.
A decade ago, the novelist Ursula le Guin said, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. But so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. And often the impetus to resistance and change begins in art.” The 2025 edit is that we live under a surreal power grab that is quite possibly a Russian Active Measures operation to destabilize the world’s largest democracy, and it too feels like an inescapable disaster. (Follow Carole Cadwalladr, Robert Reich, Timothy Snyder, and Rebecca Solnit for deep and informed responses, or binge-watch Homeland which literally has made me an armchair expert in troll farms and insurrection, but which was directly inspired by insights shared by CIA and geopolitical experts.)
To Le Guin’s reminder that any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings through our art, I’d add, and by connection. Connection with each other, and with the living wild world. Feed that. And let’s call bullshit for what it is.
Lisa Richardson is a longtime contributor to Pique whose writing, journalling workshops, yoga classes and other random contributions are fuelled by her deep gratitude for place and desire to contribute to greater community resilience.
