Royal wedding: Taking the biscuit … Prince William has asked for chocolate biscuit cake to be made for his nuptials with Kate Middleton. Over the centuries, the families that have provided this country's monarchs must have harboured many great secrets. But few, it would appear, have been as closely guarded as the recipe for chocolate biscuit cake. Prince William, who has a penchant for this particular royal delicacy, has asked for it to be made for his nuptials with Kate Middleton on April 29 alongside a traditional tiered wedding cake. – UK Telegraph
Dominant Social Theme: Such a lovely wedding. Every part of it should be presented within the proper context. A good set of nuptials should never go to waste.
Free-Market Analysis: One can find the recipe for chocolate biscuit cake almost anywhere. But such is the need to create mystery around the upcoming Royal wedding, that even something so mundane as chocolate biscuit cake receives the full "royal" treatment. Nothing in this upcoming wedding can ever be just what it is. It has to be "more." Even a chocolate biscuit cake has to be special and the recipe has to be "closely guarded."
One watches the buildup and shudders. By the time this wedding is over, people will feel more strongly about Prince William and Kate Middleton than they do about members of their own family. The coverage is just as intense as when Princess Diana married Prince Charles. Such elaborate affairs are bonding exercises. But the trouble starts when they go wrong.
In the case of Prince William's mother, almost everything that could go wrong eventually did. The trouble continued for years through a seemingly endless divorce, further estrangement and additional affairs, all celebrated with elaborate pictorials, breathless revelations and agonizing exposes. Such was her connection to the larger British (and American) society, that people mourned her death more ferociously, we would guess, than they mourned the death of members of their own blood-family.
This is not coincidence. The production of elaborate weddings (such as the kind taking place now) and other special occasions constitute a mechanism to tie the citizenry ever-more closely to the current social order. It is a matter of self-preservation from the elite's perspective.
The closer people feel to public icons and to the established order, the less likely they are to become politically active or to begin to question the fundaments of an unequal system – questioning that can lead to civil unrest and even violent overthrow. One complains a great deal about family but one does not usually try for the most part to get rid of it.
Yes, it is quite purposeful. The public supposedly "demands" these spectacles. But we would argue they would be produced whether the public wants them or not. It is certainly not for the benefit of the "royals." They are but ancillary props. Chances are Prince William and his bride would rather do without a wedding witnessed by a billion strangers. But they have little to say in the matter. The pitalls must be obvious, however. There is nowhere to hide.
Such is reality. But it is not especially healthy, or at least not for those involved. The life of Princess Diana was one long soap-opera, as intricate and compelling as any on TV. The endless sexual and psychological revelations were standard fare for the British (Western) public seemingly every day and certainly every week or month. Princess Diana died in a car crash in part because the driver was supposedly speeding to get away from the media following close behind. In a sense that media defined Princess Diana's life just as it defined her death. She was a product of the media and this was her fate whether she welcomed (as she did in some ways) or fought against it and tried to defend herself (as she did in other ways).
Surely it occurs to such manipulated people at some point in their mature lives that they are fundamentally expendable? The REAL power elite – a few unfathomably wealth banking families and their corporate and religious facilitators – never orchestrate such shows for themselves. They never have to go through such soul-killing publicity.
The logical solution to this sort of painful exposure would be to remove it. Get rid of it. Make Britain into a more normal "democracy." But it doesn't happen because the monarchy itself is a dominant social theme and one that is useful to an Anglo-American power elite. The monarchy MEANS something. In fact, it is a kind of elaborate billboard. The Royals are not valuable for themselves but as elaborate metaphorical personifications. They are the message bearers of a certain kind of instruction: Some people are born to rule; others are born to serve.
Monarchy has it defenders of course. Conservative libertarians may rush to defend monarchy as being a better form of social organization than, say, a democracy. Democracies partake of the tragedy of the commons. In a democracy, people hold power only for a short time and thus are apt to do as much looting as possible. Since much of the property in a democracy is held in common by the "public," democracies are easy to loot. Many resources are not "owned" and thus people are not paying attention to them.
In a monarchy, there is, hypothetically anyway, much less that is held in common. Monarchs may rule but they do so within a private context and have private fortunes, private income streams and, on numerous occasions as history shows they have private money woes. This is preferable to the public outlays that accompany democracy.
Of course, we would argue that the best form of government is the one that governs least. Monarchies may be a slight improvement over democracies but far superior to both are devolved, free-market sociopolitical constructs. Every law and every regulation is a price fix that ultimately degrades people's living standards by misallocating resources. The wealthiest and most prosperous societies will be those that have the fewest regulatory interferences. They will be laissez faire republics, where people have control of their governments rather than the other way round.
In the modern world there are very few societies that are organized along private lines these days. The power-elite has deliberately wiped them out over the past 100 years in our view through war, political pressure and, generally speaking, the brutal application of money power. Whatever British royalty once represented, it now serves as promotional campaign to further one-world government.
Analyzed from this perspective, Prince William's marriage will be the expression of a major dominant social theme. It will bring home in the most powerful way possible that some people are simply better than others and that "blood" itself – heredity – is an important part of rulership. This is a lesson that the power elite is most anxious to impart in our view, in the hopes that it will enhance social stability by emphasizing that people have certain places and stations in life.
The main ingredient, of a biscuit cake, we learn from the Telegraph is "the somewhat prosaic Rich Tea, which is crushed and mixed with dark chocolate." In fact, the cake obviously means something special to Prince William; perhaps it is identified with a time when his mother was still alive and he and his brother were living with her – before her death when their home was shut and their family was rearranged. But for many in his cricle, Prince William's personal tragedies mean little; he is less of a person than an expression of sociopolitical calculations. Every part of his life is bounded by his heredity and people's reactions to it.
The result of all this must be an existence of painful inauthenticity. Prince William has already lost his mother; over time he will perceive he is losing his own life as well to the relentless demands of a system he neither created nor asked to be part of. At some point, probably, he will begin to act out as men (and women) do. It will probably be as agonizing to watch (if it happens) as Princess Diana's chaotic and seemingly inevitable decline. But it will be impossible to turn away, in part because the mainstream media will not allow it.
Prince William's bad behavior – when and if it comes – will be as much as part of the process as the rest of his staged life, intended to further enhance the bond between the ruler and the ruled. If his difficulties, whatever they are, are truly spectacular, he will doubtless be featured, sooner or later, in a movie. If the movie is well produced and well received, those involved may win prizes and go onto bigger and better careers. But there will be no Oscar for Prince William.
It is hard to feel sorry for the royal and birthright privileged; and certainly to many, Prince William must seem to have an ideal and idyllic existence. Yet we would argue that money power's targets are by no means at all insignificant or impoverished. It is an equal-opportunity victimizer. It "eats its own" as relentlessly as others.
