Many people boast about their royal blood. Everyday people point to their ancestry as evidence that they have some familial link to a royal family somewhere in the world, and many people do so with pride. The question is, why would anyone want royal blood?
Royal families are inbred.
Their blood is tainted through generation after generation of inbreeding. Do you really want to be blood-related to a family of inbreds?
Royal brothers marry sisters or cousins and reproduce with them in order to ensure that their offspring is one of them, and to keep power within the family. Interestingly, royal families and the aristocracy exalt the term ‘pure blood’ or speak in praise of people who are of ‘good breeding’. How pure is the blood of someone whose parents were brother and sister?
Deformity
Inbreeding is dangerous. Societies large and small have for centuries established laws, customs and practices designed to prevent blood relatives from producing offspring, for one main reason. Inbreeding produces deformities, both physical and mental.
Even animals do all they can to avoid inbreeding.
So prevalent are the deformities of European royalty that it is possible to follow a royal family tree by examining common deformities among the family members. Through the identification of a particular deformity, one can determine who married whom, and who begat whom.
A wasted opportunity
The British royal family seem to have missed an opportunity to expand their gene pool. Meghan Markle has no blood connection (as far as I know) to anyone in the British royal family, or the extended European royal family, and she won over Prince Harry with her charm and personality. Harry and Meghan are apparently estranged from the royal family (I’m not entirely sure, I avoid royal gossip). Subsequently, they and their (future) offspring may not have any claim to the throne or official royal titles.
Had they remained firmly within the royal family, the House of Windsor could have expanded its gene pool through children whose parents have no blood connection. The British royals may have just missed an opportunity to expand the gene pool.
Royal adoption
The Sultan of Brunei is known to adopt children, mostly from Malaysia. The Sultan promotes the adoption program as a gesture of charity and goodwill which saves poor Malaysian children and provides them with a better life.
Acute observers claim that the adoption program protects his own family. The children are all granted a social title, and a privileged position within Bruneian society as relations of the royal family. They may or may not be granted the full social status worn by his immediate family, but they are given a title which places them in the upper echelons of Bruneian society.
The adopted children can then marry an immediate royal family member because they possess the necessary social title. Brunei has a population of less than 500, 000 people, including expats and other non-Malay residents, and only a tiny section of that small population is eligible to marry royalty – namely those with a high-ranking social title awarded by the royal family.
Thus, if royalty marries an adopted child, the power stays within the family, but the married couple is not blood related and the gene pool is protected.
Non-royal inbreds
How many people would boast about familial connection to other people who are known to marry their relatives?
Residents of remote, obscure country towns have a reputation for inbreeding. They often have limited opportunity to meet other people when they’re stuck out on a remote farm or tiny village, so they find other ways to continue their family. Few people celebrate their connection to ‘inbred country bumpkins’, but these people are no more inbred than royal families.
Dole bludgers
Furthermore, no one is likely to announce their connection to a family of dole bludgers. And yet, that’s exactly what royal families are. They don’t work for a living, and taxpayers pay for them to live. Most of them live in absolute luxury at the expense of the ordinary person. Are you proud to be related to the world’s richest dole bludgers?
Money and power
Establishing a blood connection to a royal family has its benefits. It can increase someone’s wealth and power, and certainly improve someone’s job prospects. Boasting of a blood connection to a royal family in order to increase wealth and power is understandable, but many people promote their lineage as an inherent sign of personal prestige, as if somehow their connection to royalty, as faint as it may be, makes them a better person.
The next time you hear someone boasting about their royal blood, consider the composition of that blood.
Image: http://www.ft.com
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