An unfortunate feature of our current age is the tendency to designate certain people or institutions as villains and then blame them for every bad thing that happens to you, including things inflicted by fate or for which you yourself are responsible.
The hurricane unleashed by Prince Harry, in his book Spare and the numerous interviews he has been giving to plug it, is a prime example. Harry presents himself and Meghan as victims of the Royal household and a Britain that has turned against them, while refusing to accept any responsibility for what he and his wife have themselves done to bring that about. And indeed, the country turned against them solely because of the selfish, narcissistic and hurtful way they have behaved.
The details are too numerous and tedious to mention here. Among the most patently ludicrous of Harry’s claims, however, is over the reaction to his remark that, when he served as a helicopter pilot in Afghanistan, he viewed the Taleban fighters he killed not as people but as as pieces on a chessboard. He subsequently claimed that the torrent of criticism he received was caused by the media spinning his remarks out of context.
This was demonstrably untrue, since the media merely reported what he had written in his book. The soldiers and senior military personnel who furiously condemned Harry were merely reacting to his own words.
Yet despite his vicious attacks on his brother, father and stepmother in an apparently unstoppable geyser of accusations — many of which have been shown to be factually wrong or untrue — Harry deserves a great deal of sympathy. The fact that his self-pity is so unattractive should not prevent us from having pity for him.
His behaviour clearly derives from a lifetime of unhealed and intolerable pain, caused by the breakdown of his parents’ marriage and the subsequent death of his mother in that Paris car crash. He is exceedingly unlikely to have healed that pain by his current behaviour towards his family. On the contrary, there must surely be concerns that the tragedy of his life is even now still unfolding, with unknowable consequences.
Nevertheless, as I have previously noted here, Harry’s behaviour is also a prime example of today’s victim culture. Its characteristic is the denial of personal responsibility and the pathological projection of blame onto others. Certain groups that identify themselves as victims of other groups or individuals proceed to demonise these as villains incapable of doing anything good, while their self-professed victims cannot be held responsible for doing anything bad.
This mindset is not confined to the usual race and gender suspects of identity politics. It is also demonstrated in our intensely polarised and Manichaean political sphere — in which issues and personalities are either black or white, there is no true middle ground, and balance and reason have gone out of the window.
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