#wokery

But I have to say out of all the revelations that irked me the most it was his revelation of how many Taliban ‘terrorists’ he killed out in Afghanistan. He said he killed around 25 Taliban fighters as a gunner on an Apache helicopter.

There is no reason not to believe him. These things can be easily verified to some extent when after a mission you look over the recorded footage. That’s not what irks me. What bothers me is why he chose to say all this.

There is a code amongst soldiers that you don’t talk about this shit. It’s so unprofessional and unseemly. Even amongst soldiers we don’t talk about it. We know about it but we still don’t talk about it. War is mostly tedious, boring, and waiting around for the shit to hit the fan. But when it does you move your arse into gear and get your job done. And when it’s done, come home, crack open a beer with comrades out of shared relief, be thankful you made it out alive, and then shut the fuck up.

I think Harry really has let himself down and his fellow army brothers and sisters. Forget for a moment the security risk because of his disclosure, amongst British veterans I chat with on private social media, they feel a sense of personal betrayal. I don’t feel that but I do feel Harry hasn’t done himself any favours in regaining the genuine respect every soldier had for him for getting his hands dirty in the trenches and not expecting any special favours because he was a royal.

It’s hard not to feel some sympathy for Harry. It can’t be easy being the spare, the younger brother whose role in the royal “firm” started in a position of subordination and has become steadily more subordinate as more direct heirs arrive to dilute his lineage. There are plenty of younger siblings who have suffered in this way although none of us can imagine the particular hardship of being the “spare” to a throne. Add to that the unimaginable repressed pain and grief of losing his mother and to do so in public is something none of us can fathom. No wonder he was happy in the army where he could be himself and achieve things on personal merit, and more importantly, be away from the fierce and unforgiving public glare.

But that was then. That was the Harry before he met Meghan Markle. A very different Harry has emerged. He sounded less British and more American with all this woke gobble gook. I mean this as no slight to my American friends but Harry should really trade in his British passport and become a permanent resident of California.

What I saw made me pity him. I saw a man so seething with resentment, so unaware of his own privilege, that he is eaten up with petty grievances. He complains about his stepmother turning his old bedroom at Clarence House into a dressing room – when he was 28 years old and in possession of an entire house of his own. We see a man so dim he sees no contradiction between expressing hope for a reconciliation with his family, at the very same time as bitching about them on the world stage. A man so lacking in self-awareness he sees no hypocrisy in complaining about the press intruding on his privacy, in the exact same breath as he tells tittle tattle tales about his brother and sister-in-law. A man so self-absorbed he has no notion of duty, service or respect – either to brotherly bonds, the royal family or the ‘code of silence’ among soldiers.

Why would anyone expose themselves to the world in this way?

A common explanation is that Harry is doing this for the money - that in order to fund his Montecito lifestyle he must sell his soul to Netflix and Penguin books. I’m not sure I buy that argument fully. Certainly through the the many interviews and hours of Netflix footage show no sign of a man held hostage, with personal details being cajoled out of him against his will. Another common explanation that Meghan puts him up to it but as popular as that prevailing view is in the UK, I really don’t think he had Meghan Markle by his side to be so insufferable and whiney. Ms. Markle may have given him the ammunition of language (‘unconscious bias’, ‘white privilege’, ‘lived experience’, ‘my truth’ etc) but the thoughts are all his. This is all on him and his repressed resentments towards his own family.

Watching Harry unload is as fascinating as watching a car crash in slow motion. To me Harry is a cautionary tale of what happens when we abandon all boundaries between the public and private spheres of our lives. Harry seems to have lost any sense of a border between his interior world of thoughts and feelings, and the outside world of speech; between the private realm of family and home and the public realm of work, responsibility and social convention.

Call me a stiff arsed Brit but I am not the only one. I feel I reflect the private horror of most British people that someone could be so confessional in such a shamelessly public way. It’s like the staple ending of all romcom Hollywood movies where the guy has to confess his error before the crowd to win back the girl.

We Brits take another approach. Families argue all the time. Siblings fight. We get angry and upset. And in the heat of the moment, we say things we might later regret. Crucially, this takes place behind closed doors, in private. The privacy of the home allows us to behave badly, but also to forgive each other and move on. Making details of private squabbles public imbues them with a permanence that they were never meant to have.

If the late Queen Elizabeth II represented an old set of values, Harry and Meghan best embody the new era. The two generations of royals could not be more different. Out goes the stiff upper lip, in comes public emoting. ‘Never complain, never explain’ has been replaced by a six-hour Netflix ‘pity party’. Service to others has been redefined as sharing mental-health struggles. Where the late Queen spoke of nationhood, the Sussexes speak of victimhood. The late Queen kept her cancer diagnosis secret until her death. We read about Meghan’s miscarriage in her column for the New York Times.

The late Queen’s commitment to serve represented more than just an individual pledge. It captured a generational ethos. Harry and Meghan embody the elite assumptions of their age.

There’s the identitarianism, masquerading as anti-racism. By presenting herself as a victim of racism – on, it must be said, rather spurious grounds of ‘unconscious bias’ a term so beloved of HR corporate departments – Meghan Markle has gained status and authority. And in marrying Meghan Markle, Harry is no longer the soldier who introduced us to his ‘little Paki friend’, but a warrior against racism. He is born again. Hallelujah!

Meghan’s gender supposedly makes her a victim, too. She takes every opportunity to remind us that, as a child, she wrote a letter complaining about a sexist advert for washing-up liquid.

Then there’s the Sussexes’ insistence on proclaiming ‘their truth’. Harry and Meghan claim that the truth is whatever they happen to feel at any point in time. If you feel that you were raised without siblings (Meghan) or that you were ‘literally’ brought up in Africa (Harry), then everyone else better just accept it. Although, as the queen so succinctly put it, ‘recollections may vary’.

Woke advocates like Harry and Meghan insist that truth is subordinate to the political narrative. You don’t need to bring any evidence when you’re railing against a supposedly racist media and a Brexit Britain still not over losing the empire.

This is not just about Harry and Meghan. The values this privileged couple embody and the ideas they articulate are continually affirmed by the cultural elite. Netflix, Spotify and book publishers stump up millions for their output. Just this month, the Sussexes were recognised for their ‘philanthropic work fighting against racism and oppression around the world’ by the Robert F Kennedy Human Rights organisation. Academics and journalists lend credibility to their remarks on the Commonwealth and their criticisms of the media. An army of tweeters and commentators are permanently ready to leap to the couple’s defence.

The late Queen’s death also seems to mean that taking pot-shots at the monarchy has become completely acceptable. In their Netflix series, Harry and Meghan criticise ‘the palace’ frequently. They moan about William’s shouting and Charles’s indifference. They mock rituals like curtseying, and visibly struggle with the notion of hierarchy.

Harry seems to resent his place on the hierarchy within the royal family. His resentment is no different in character from any sibling rivalry or our place in society’s hierarchal social and class structures.

Ideas of resentment and jealousy of course echo through time - all the way back to the Garden of Eden with Lucifer resenting God’s creation of Adam and Eve. They have also played a prominent part in the 19th Century, when philosophers sought to create new theories of morality without God. Friedrich Nietzsche, one of my favourite philosophers, borrowed a French word, ressentiment, to anchor the origins of his moral philosophy. By his estimation, Western moral thinking had its roots in the master-slave relationship.

The weak and marginalised members of society (such as persecuted Christians) resented those who oppressed them (the masters) and inverted the prevailing morality, turning humility, equality and compassion into the highest virtues. Nietzsche, one of my favourite philosophers, put it best, “While the noble man lives in trust and openness with himself … the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naive nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul squints; his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert entices him as his world, his security, his refreshment.”

The dominant creed of the resentful for most of the 20th Century was Socialism. As George Orwell pointed out, socialists don’t generally love the poor, they hate the rich. When Marxist materialism became discredited with the realisation of the economic failures of the Soviet Union and the rising death counts of Communists and Socialist regimes around the world, the bearers of ‘ressentiment’ turned to other domains into which to inject their venom. Key targets were the spheres of culture, family life, sex, and race.

And so was born critical theory, the bastard child of Post-Modernism and Frankfurt School post-Marxism. To this conception we owe the hierarchy of victimhood, the one to which we must now all defer; it also spawned the language of the social justice warriors - words such as “my truth”, “lived experience”, “white privilege” (or any other kind of privilege for that matter) “intersectionality” and so on.

The virus of critical theory was smuggled into the American culture via academia (two members of the Frankfurt School - Marcuse and Adorno - actually emigrated from Germany to US universities before the war). And from academia, critical theory (popularly understood as wokery) has infected the media, publishing, newsrooms, Hollywood, sports commentators, public administration, HR departments, and even Big Tech. Perhaps the last place you would expect it to appear is the British Royal family. But here comes along Harry, a Prince in the House of Windsor.

I think deep down Harry’s resentment gives credence to his self-belief that he himself is a victim and therefore a loser in life’s lottery, even if he does come from the most privileged of the privileged. Harry has no doubt been deeply frustrated by his status within the family and the nature of his “spare”ness. There is resentment and there is jealousy. Of course the woke creed appeals. And no wonder Harry adopts its language. Which leaves us, ironically, with a hereditary Prince lecturing us about ‘privilege’.

Moreover, Harry’s conduct says a lot about the prevailing norms of our culture about confessing our ‘sins’, and therefore our souls. Harry has been taught to reveal every last intimate detail of his life. More likely, he has been taught by therapists and mentors that this is the right thing to do.

The popular assumption today is that keeping things private or ‘bottled up’ is bad. Complete openness is the best - indeed, the only - way to safeguard your mental health. Harry has imbibed the message that ‘speaking your truth’ is the route to authenticity. We live in an age when being authentic to our ‘true selves’ is considered the pinnacle of achievement. Where centring our own emotional needs above our work, community and even family members is considered not selfish, but imperative.

Fear-mongering about the dark side of privacy has been a popular pastime of psychologists since the time of Sigmund Freud. Over many decades, such beliefs have moved off the therapist’s couch to take root in our broader culture.

Today, the words ‘private’, ‘secret’ and ‘behind closed doors’ arouse suspicion. Rather than conjuring images of home, or the family, a haven in a heartless world, the private sphere has come to be seen as a site of abuse. Reserve, a stiff-upper lip and stoicism are all now considered negative personality traits denoting a lack of warmth and openness. The compulsion to share, to break down the barriers between public and private, is embedded in every aspect of our culture from primary school circle-time to social media, from the advice dished out in magazines to the platitudes spouted by celebrities.

Well, I say screw that.

The irony, of course, is that our sense of ourselves does not become stronger the more it is revealed – it becomes weaker. It leaves us to depend on others to validate our feelings and desires. This is what seems to lie behind Harry’s emotional incontinence. He is not a man exercising agency, in control, seeking only a fat pay cheque. He’s become a pathetic, fragile creature, incapable of seeing beyond his own immediate feelings, unable to exist without constant public validation.  

Look, there are of course other dimensions to Harry’s story. There is the tragic shadow of his mother and the diva attention seeking influence of his Hollywood D-list wife. But to the extent that he is a victim, he is the victim not only of his family circumstances but also of poisonous philosophers and the prevailing dominance of American cultural colonialism of wokery (in this the French intellectuals and commentators are 100% correct, as both left and right see it as a specific American wokery, but fail to see that they originally gave birth to this bastard of an incoherent and nihilistic ideology). Perhaps his example can be a cautionary tale to the rest of us. Harry shows us the importance of keeping some things private....because not everything is about you or me.

So, Harry, for the love of God or even for your much beloved granny, just shut the fuck up!