BY STEPHEN PAX LEONARD
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is the Underground Man
Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground is the pseudonymous monologue of a spiteful and bitter former government official who inherited a sufficient amount of money not to need to work again and devoted his life to vice. Dostoyevsky’s philosophical novella is concerned with the hypothetical utopia where all of man’s needs are met, where everything is safe and comfortable and where man only has to fit in and play along with the system in order to “have his gingerbread”. The Underground Man is asked upon simply to bask in pleasure and entertainment, and steer clear of the rocks. But, this is apparently not an option for him because his only concern is to defend his absolute freedom against any potential restrictions on it. The Underground Man takes this to extremes by even objecting to the mathematical certainty that 2+2=4 on the grounds that this is an imposition on his freedom of thought. His purpose in life is then to unceasingly prove that he is a free agent and “not a piano key” – a recurring motif in the novella for the reduction of humans to the sum of their parts, and all the determinism that that implies.
The existentialist Underground Man suffers from the infinity of possibilities of choice, and through this prism Dostoyevsky rather prophetically chooses to explore the notion of irrationality and some of the more puzzling contradictions of human nature.
For the Underground Man, the world moves according to the impulses of the human will and that is all. He validates his existence by simply doing things that confirm his individuality. Out of sheer ingratitude, he does nasty things. He commits acts that cause him suffering, is aware of their destructiveness and yet keeps going because he is “plagued with boredom”. In all these nihilistic pursuits of free will (he is prone to shouting “no one is touching my free will”), he cannot find a way to live an ‘authentic’ life, and thus becomes alienated socially and ontologically from society.
The Underground Man appears to be the epitome of Kierkegaard’s notion of optimal deprivation. He has everything he needs, and in the end what becomes lacking is lack itself. The Danish Christian philosopher, Kierkegaard, believed this resulted in man not being able to find a true existence and experiences instead what he calls “sickness unto death”. Dostoyevsky’s novella was prophetic in this sense because some parts of western society have come to reflect surely this optimal deprivation. For example, I am thinking of Norway whose citizens often describe themselves as bortskjemt (‘spoilt because the Government has over-provided for them and this sense of entitlement has resulted in laziness, an unwillingness to work and thus a lack of drive which can give life meaning’). As well as optimal deprivation, contemporary society increasingly reflects the destructive egotism characterised in the Underground Man such as when he says: “I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea”. I fear that in the future the Underground Man’s struggle will become ours.
With this in mind and many years after having read this precursor of existentialist thinking, the Underground Man has of late, and particularly in the context of the Epstein scandal, resurfaced in my thinking. Indeed, as the extraordinary revelations regarding Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor continue to accumulate in the light of the latest release of the Epstein Files, many people are asking the obvious question: why did the former Prince do the things he did, why did he relentlessly pursue the cesspit of evil when all he had to do was live a life of immense privilege and stay out of the newspapers? Andrew chose this path because he is the Underground Man. He fits in fact perfectly the Underground Man’s definition of man: “the ungrateful biped characterised by perpetual moral obliquity […] who enjoys the consciousness of his own degradation”.
Dostoyevsky’s masterly novella concludes by saying in the words of the quintessential anti-hero: “I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and what’s more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourself”. There is no sense of remorse expressed here for in his view he has rebelled against the pre-determined laws of society; he simply accepts his miserable existence and alienation as reality. Like the Undergound Man, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is now left alone in a meaningless and increasingly degrading world fencing himself in on the peripheries of the Sandringham Estate. His ostracization is the result of his endless pursuing an absolute freedom of will which ironically has left him cooped up on a farm.
If the latest revelations are anything to go by, it seems that the late Queen’s troublesome second son has few absolute values and will continue to wallow in his assuredness. Unlike the Underground Man, he needs to choose another path and repent. Dostoyevsky famously said that: “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted”. It would seem that Andrew needs to be reminded that God does indeed exist. If he does in fact have a relationship to God, he needs to repair it urgently. And if he doesn’t, he needs to find one. This lover of pleasure should now try and “return to the soil” (as Dostoyevsky put it). That is, return to personal responsibility, self-sacrifice, brotherly love and God. Only by pursuing this path of redemption will he curtail the chaos of his impulses, find meaning and at the same time ensure that he is more than “a piano key”.
Stephen Pax Leonard is a writer, linguist, traveller. His book Noble Sentiments for an Exile and Other Writings has been published and is now available here.