I’ve always been a Monarchist at heart. Ever since I was a kid and I read things like The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights and The Lord of the Rings, the concept of the Lord’s anointed has appealed to me as the most logical method of human government. Anyone who reads my books can easily tell that there is Monarchism deep at the heart of it all. It really shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, Christ is King, right? Heaven isn’t a Democracy; and Heaven is hierarchical. It is said that there will be greatest and least in Heaven…of course, even the least in Heaven has it better than the greatest on Earth; and given that it is Heaven, there isn’t a matter of jealousy or ambition. The least will be pleased that the greatest in Heaven are the greatest. I can imagine myself – certainly not the greatest – living in one of the very small mansions in my Father’s house, and gladly serving the greatest. I honestly can see in my mind’s eye a heavenly abode for me; it is made of stone and set in a meadow. With eternity, imagine the stories I could eventually tell? My joy would be complete.

There have been many kings and queens, good and bad, in history. Descent does have a bit of the luck of the draw in it. But if you look at the royal lines over time, what you see is that for the most part, most monarchs were trying to do the right thing. Sometimes ably, sometimes less so. Only rarely was a real idiot or criminal raised to the throne. Democracy is far more apt to raise the unfit on the simple fact that anyone who aspires to power is predisposed to be an idiot or criminal. What fool, after all, would really want to be in charge? To seriously have the fate of a nation in your hands? The wise person flees from such a burden, if he can. A good example of this wisdom is a scene in the 1956 movie of War and Peace. Natasha (Audrey Hepburn) tells Pierre (Henry Fonda) that she would give him absolute power over Russia because his heart is pure…Pierre is asked what he’d do and his answer is, “I’d hesitate”. That is wisdom, as such.

To be sure, as I’ve said before, I am also the last democrat left on Earth. Maybe not exactly the last, but certainly there aren’t many like me. That is, people who really do trust the people. But one must keep in mind what “trust the people” means. It isn’t taking a public opinion poll of dependent people who have been relentlessly lied to by an overwhelming popular culture. It is simply accepting the decision of people who are free and as independent as society can make them. A mature man or woman who owes nobody making a decision: I ratify it, even if I think its wrong. I do think that voting is crucial, even in the most venerable of a Monarchy. The king does need to know the desires of the people; and the only way to really assess that is to ask them. But just as Monarchy is highly dependent upon the quality of the Monarch, so Democracy is highly dependent upon the quality of the People. Garbage in, garbage out is ineluctable.

We are, as we all know, in a complete mess right now. I saw a video clip of a young lady wrapped in a Palestine flag saying she was terrified that climate change would kill her. Just think of the amount of lies she had to be fed over years to get to such a pathetic state. And in our current system, she gets a vote. That is, she gets to cancel me out – not that I’m any great person, but I have at least some knowledge and so I’m not supporting the massacre of Jews nor am I afraid of the temperature rising a couple degrees over the next 100 years. The bottom line is that getting out of the current mess is going to be a problem as long as people like that poor girl get a say. She’s simply incapable of making a valid decision – even about her own life (though we will always remain wary of interfering in the personal choices of even the greatest fool). We must find a method to nullify the votes of fools – because if we don’t, then we’ll never be able to get at the liars who make the fools.

Because that is the crux of the matter: the lies. If we didn’t have quite so many liars, we wouldn’t have nearly so many problems. But the liars lie because lies work – and in a system where only voting matters, then the best liar is going to usually prevail. Only rarely will someone even partially moored to truth rise to the top in a Democratic system. Our riddle is how to preserve freedom while making sure fools serving liars can’t destroy freedom.