Diana: A Wasted Life

 While going through some old files I found the full version of a review of Andrew Morton's biography of Diana Spencer that was submitted for publication in The Resister.  But the editor rewrote it to drop the philosophy and even got her maiden name wrong so here it is without further editing.

DIANA: A Wasted Life

By Leslie Bates

One of the things I do for my own selfish pleasure is to take a sketchbook and a drafting pencil and draw.  For the last fifteen years the second favorite subject of my work was Diana, the Princess of Wales. [1]  So when Andrew Morton's biography of Diana was originally published I purchased a copy.  It took me four months to work up the nerve to finish the first chapter.  I did not (and no rational egoist could) enjoy the spectacle of seeing a soul being crushed by a band of witch doctors. [2]

To properly become an adult, a child must gain moral knowledge, to know what human life is and how to live it.  What Diana received as a child was close to pure poison.  Her parents sent Diana to a boarding school, the Church of England's equivalent of a Dewey Camp.  Here she was pounded with the doctrines that selflessness was the moral ideal, that sacrifice and obedience were virtues, that independent judgement was evil, that her mind was impotent to deal with material existence, and that the non-existent (God and Heaven) was superior to that which exists (Man and the Earth).  Her mind thus mangled, it should have been no surprise that her life would be mangled as well.

With her intellectual and moral development arrested in childhood, Diana became a Second Hander, someone who avoids moral judgement and is dependent of others for guidance.  To avoid judgement is to suspend consciousness, it is to effectively shut down the mind and to enter the mental equivalent of a state of death.  With her mind snuffed out it should not have been a surprise to anyone that Diana would shortly be physically snuffed out.

Diana was told that the royal family was the pinnacle of civilized society.  A rational person would have seen British royalty as a useless remnant of a barbaric tradition, and that the monarch had become nothing more than a hand puppet for ruling party.  No sane woman would condemn any of her children to such a fate.

During her engagement Diana discovered that her fiancee was a pragmatist who had an active sexual affair with an already married woman and who had no intention of breaking off the affair.  A rational woman would have dumped the the snivelling piece of hominid garbage on the spot, Diana asked her sisters for advice and was told to go through with the marriage out of duty. [3]

As a second hander, Diana had no self esteem and was dependent on others for advice and approval, she valued what others told her to value.  This led to her constant pursuit of public attention and her spending an absurd amount of time being photographed hugging crippled children and walking biohazards. [4]  Her capacity for judgement paralyzed, Diana paid for guidance from psychics and astrologers and even took direction from her own sons.  It was with the approval of a psychic and her sons that Diana entered a close [nudge nudge] relationship with the Egyptian playboy Dodi al Fayed.

Dodi al Fayed was the unproductive son of a pull peddler who lived on an allowance, routinely bounced checks, and manipulated women.  A rational woman would have screamed and ran away.  Dodi also was in the habit of bribing limousine drivers to radically violate (100+ MPH) local speed limits. [5] Left to his own devices, Dodi al Fayed was a top contender for the Darwin Award. [6] 

Even if a rational woman were not aware of Dodi's other vices, she would have seen his open contempt for his own life as cause for alarm.  But on the advice of others Diana put her trust in a whim-worshipping third world savage, and as a consequence paid the ultimate price.

Diana was an excellent example of how not to live, she could have avoided the aforementioned horrors by simply saying: "No, this is wrong, I won't do it."  To do so requires a valid knowledge of moral standards, and for Diana to know that she was right to exercise moral judgement.  It is not enough to know that there is an alternative to a particular course of action, one must know that the alternative is morally correct. [7]
     
Footnotes

1. The favorite subject being myself.

2. When I first read this my thought was, "If this is how the ruling class educates their children then its no wonder that England is becoming a third world country."

3. She would have been better off shacking up with a godless capitalist from Minneapolis, but I digress.

4. HIV infected individuals.

5. I usually cruise on the freeways between 65 and 70 MPH.

6. Posthumously given to the individual who exits the gene pool in a absurdly stupid manner.

7. This problem isn't unique to Diana.  The reason The RESISTER dropped the Moral Decision Game was that while many of the entrants identified the correct tactical solution, no one could name the principle of Objectivist ethics underlying the solution.