Royalty and Control of Self

Vodou has the concept of kings and queens—people often identify that with a priests’ vocation, but in my experience those two things are not necessarily related.

I am new enough to still be learning, but one of the things I’ve learned about royalty is that it involves the highest level of control of self, which does not mean the same thing that people think of when they say “self-control.”

Self-control is, often as not, a constant litany of self-denial based on some collection of moral rules that people absorb from their religious and cultural upbringing (or a book they read, and rarely conversations later in life.) It is less control of the self and more a pattern of denial and excess wrapped around a bunch of poorly understood rules. Denial inevitably becomes excess, because most of the rules self-control is wrapped around are aimed at trying to prevent life from happening to the person.

Life happens to you until you die. It’s rather inevitable.

Control of self is not that structured. It’s also a lot harder to directly define, because it doesn’t have the same set of codified rules. Someone practicing control of self does not wear special clothes, or behave like a monk, etc.

If I had to say what control of self is (at this point in my learning), it is the degree to which the person can make a conscious choice: the person’s free will, which I have seen very little of in people for my whole life. Most of what people do is, generally speaking, what their parents did, what their friends or community or popular figures say to do.

I would say what people dead for hundreds of years said they should do here but if you’re paying attention, you know that people generally opt for someone newer’s interpretation over literal interpretations, which just tells you how little free will they’re exercising.

Royalty is easiest to see in its influence—people who have control of self tend to inspire others to change, and specifically to pursue greater control of self. They demonstrate what it is to have free will to others, making it visible for people to see and want to attain.

If your leaders aren’t doing this, you might want to reconsider who you follow.