Why Do People Fantasize About Being Royalty?

Chapter 10.3: Hereditary Authority: The End of an Error

Chapter 10.3

Hereditary Authority: The End of an Error

Fantasy…

Go to Disney World and look around. The place is crawling with little girls in princess costumes their parents spent way too much money on. None of them is wearing a peasant costume.

Look at park attractions and their descriptions:

“Meet a Disney Princess…”

“Dine among royalty…”

“Be regally entertained…”

“Pose for your royal photo…”

In the Disney universe (as of this writing) there are 11 official Disney princesses. Seven were born into royalty; three married into it. One, Mulan, is “non-noble,” but still ends up working in the imperial court. Being one of the royal elite is definitely where it’s at.

Cinderella starts out as a “lowly” scullery maid, but by the end, what happens? She marries Prince Charming and enters the fabulous world of hereditary aristocracy.

Even the Little Mermaid gets in on the act—starting out life as the seventh daughter of King Triton, and thus a princess in her own right, and then becoming Princess Consort upon her marriage to Prince Eric. Why let being half-fish get in the way of her dreams?

Our fantasy stories are often about kings and knights in shining armor, beautiful princesses, and noble princes. They’re rarely focused on commoners, and when they are, they frequently depict how the lives of commoners intersect with royalty, or how that one lucky commoner finds out that he himself is royalty. (Notice how when people muse over the notion of reincarnation, they rarely say, “In a past life, I was a one of the rabble.”)

Stories about royals and hereditary aristocrats are as deeply embedded in our culture as their reality is in our history. We’re aware, both consciously and culturally, that it was better to be one of the hereditary elite than to be among the far more numerous ranks of the common folk. That awareness became a cultural leitmotif, reflected in the fantasies and daydreams of people across the globe.

Reality…

The reality of hereditary rule is rather more complex than the fantasies we’ve built around it.

In the Holocaust, people were rounded up and killed for no reason other than their membership in particular groups. Not because they posed any specific threat to the regime—just because of who they were at birth. That is why children were rounded up along with their parents—they were deemed “guilty” from their first breath.

Humanity’s long march under the principles of hereditary rule was predicated on the same notion. People were members of a class from their first breath: highborn and lowborn. The rulers and the ruled.