An empire is a machine for building the past. World powers are so because they determine their own history (with the invaluable help of submarines, tanks, and nuclear bombs), thus being able to control what the sentimental call the narrative. The primary success of Isabel II was to impose her history and a very particular form of personal ethics through a political structure, the monarchy, which she herself could almost sense was on the verge of extinction when she was crowned in 1953 (currently, just over forty countries in the world maintain this form of government, most of them in a symbolic-constitutional way). Today you will be able to read a handful of articles about how the stubbornness of the great Lilibet has managed to survive an army of prime ministers, popes, and so on: but the important thing about all this is how the queen has been able to prolong a culture of power that will bury her corpse.The monarch's first rule is to challenge the dialectic between the visible and the secret. Elizabeth learned this suddenly, when she very reluctantly agreed to televise her extraordinary coronation ceremony. Since then, the queen has very skillfully surfed between this initial overexposure, maintaining the level of secrecy that the crown demands: she knew perfectly well, in short, that to generate admiration, whispers, and fear, it is very important not to be seen entirely. Today politics plays at the banality of an excess of transparency, our leaders are slaves to the hyper-fast opinion demanded by Twitter; the grace of the queen and of any monarchy is precisely that one ignores what the monarch exactly thinks. In fact, as Hegel already warned us in thePhilosophy of Law, it doesn't matter if the monarch thinks or not, because his task is not intellectual: his only obligation is to float above contingencies.Lilibet did so; its ethical greatness is not longevity, as many banal spirits think, but that unheard-of capacity to avoid the news and place itself in a posture of apparent feminine eternity.In this aspect, the queen experienced a difficulty that she turned into a virtue: as is known, when she was young, no one gave a damn about her, third in the line of succession, with a charisma far inferior to that of her father and a practically illiterate historical-literary education. But Elizabeth embraced an equally ancient concept such as moral duty (namely, the secularization of sacrifice) to become strong and remember that in life one cannot always choose and that obligations take precedence over fun. They say that the work of a perspicacious monarch is to modernize an institution of an ancient nature. Quite the opposite; the king, if he must demonstrate anything, is that old ideas are still worthwhile.
Comparisons are odious, but Charles III (future Charles "the brief") will not be able to maintain the same cultural paradigm, and not only because a large part of the English and world population associates him with a Tampax, but because he has acceded to the throne in a world affected by post-colonialism (one of his last institutional speeches took place in Barbados which, after proclaiming its independence in 1966, dispensed with the monarchy of the United Kingdom in a sordid ceremony in which Charles had to admit that "the darkest days of our past, and the appalling atrocity of slavery, forever stain our history"). In this new world to come, it will be almost impossible for Charles to follow his mother's rule – namely, to have power without commanding power structures – because, I insist, today everything becomes visible and leaders must continually seek forgiveness. He would do well to abdicate as soon as possible.
It is very notorious that the only moments of crisis that Elizabeth II experienced in the modern stage of her reign were the reaction to the death of Princess Diana (the queen was accused of lack of empathy in a world that prioritizes compassion, mourning and emotions in wisdom), Prince Andrew's excursions to the islet of sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein and Prince Harry's exile with his American chati. All of this, signs of a time where mawkishness expands, where it's almost impossible not to take photos with underage girls and where personal sacrifice means nothing to you when you have enough money to do whatever you want.With Isabel, a part of the past has died, and the British monarchy will find it difficult to recover it.But, as popular wisdom says, everyone makes fun of the United Kingdom, but the islanders always get their way and the world ends up imitating them in almost everything they do.
Rest, my queen, owner of the past.
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