Why Harry and Meghan matter

Perhaps the most important root cause of the rot of institutions is the therapeutic approach to life. Put simply, Therapeutic Man thinks that things which make a person feel bad are not to be borne but to be treated. We have to be careful here. Of course, medical conditions (including conditions pertaining to mental health) do require therapy and treatment. But for many millennials like the Sussexes, the therapeutic paradigm has metastasized into an all-encompassing framework for approaching and solving all of life’s problems. Nietzsche said that he who has a why can bear any how, but what happens if the why is the how? That is to say, what if the purpose of life is thought to be the avoidance of suffering per se? What will a person suffer for if suffering itself is thought to be the ultimate evil? Meghan and Harry constantly spoke about what they’d suffered as royals as if this suffering justified their decision to turn on the monarchy in some sort of self-evident way. But other members of the royal family haven’t thought like this. The Queen had to uproot a happy family life in Malta and ask her husband to abandon his naval career when she acceded to the throne. The Duchess of Cambridge spent the better part of a decade being tortured by the tabloids (and without a royal protection detail) before marrying Prince William. If either of these two women had conceived of life in a fundamentally therapeutic way, they might not have chosen the paths they did. There are certainly less stressful lines of work.

Therapeutic Man, in any case, is certainly not suited to institutional life. He considers himself to be a victim first and foremost, taking every hardship as an occasion to retreat inward into the self so as to nurse the ego back to health. Institutional life demands the opposite course of action: to accept suffering voluntarily as a way of advancing the cause (whatever it may be) and to look outward for consolation — to the institution’s lofty purpose — rather than inward, toward one’s own neuroses.

Since, for Therapeutic Man, suffering cannot be imbued with meaning or purpose, alleviating it must be the ultimate aim and achievement of the life well-lived.