09 November 2009

Princess Diana and the Queen Mother

When I say that I find people's psychologies incomprehensible this is because I find nothing in them that corresponds to basic principles in my own; in fact there seems often to be a deliberate inversion of them. I imagined that since Sir George Joy had had a mystical experience up a mountain in Arabia, even if he would do nothing to help me he would not actively create difficulties for me. I thought this would be a general principle which someone who had had a mystical experience would apply to anyone with an obvious aim or sense of direction. In fact it turned out not to be so and he joined in with the machinations against me as enthusiastically as anyone else. A friend of mine from Somerville, who had been brought up in a hotbed of socialist ideology, commented on my naiveté in having supposed he would do anything to help me, at least in the sense of not hindering me.

She seemed amused that I should have thought such a thing, as if she had more insight than I did, and no doubt she did, because this is one of the things that I always find incomprehensible, as I can find no parallel to it in my own psychology.

In fact one finds that what one might have supposed to be principles in the context of old-fashioned bourgeois psychology no longer are, and instead inversions of them appear to be regarded as appropriate principles of conduct

The behaviour of Princess Diana when she married into the Royal Family, in comparison with that of the late Queen Mother, might be regarded as a striking example of this. The Queen Mother maintained absolute discretion about the affairs of the royal family, even to members of her own family. Princess Diana, although from an equally aristocratic family, lost no time in spilling the beans on Prince Charles to the media, and washing her dirty linen as publicly as possible, which was successful in gaining the sympathy of the population for herself and accelerating the decline of the monarchy, which in turn is associated with an increasing level of criminal behaviour throughout the country. (The social workers etc. who act ostensibly against the criminal or antisocial behaviour are actually no less criminal than the muggers and rapists, although in slightly less obvious ways.)