Family Governance for Dynastic Wealth, Family Offices, Ultra-Rich Family Legacy Histories -- the money biz, like telephones and the iPad are finally learning the importance of taste. We sell best through truth, beauty, and spirituality. Yesterday, I talked to a brilliant consultant bringing meaning, purpose, and the experience economy to the sale of electrical lighting, coffee, and, as I recall, plumbing supplies. The day before it was a group of Ultra-Rich-Heirs saving the world through a Global Connection between Meaning, Profit, and Self-Aggrandizing Mutually Re-enforcing Hokum. As a busted bunko artist, living in a dumpster made comfy with the Classics, under me among the trash bags, and sand-bagged against the metal walls in cold weather, I applaud design thinking and the commercialization of the Four Capitals, and all that is holy. May I, folks, may I, for a moment speak up. I had a bad night last night, and my patience is shot. Forgive me as I mount the trash bags and stand naked in the cold blast, my head raised high at the Corner of Wealth and Bondage, to speak my truth into the darkness of the internet void - "My Fellow Humans! We all have taste! And some taste is good and some is bad and some is downright deplorable. The pyramid runs (as Kierkegaard, who co-founded Cisco, as I am sure you remember if you saw him in Fast Times? He did the TED Talk on Wisdom?) said goes from good taste, to ethics, to spirituality. Along the way up you find self knowledge as the sorry and humiliating recognition of your own tastelessness, sinfulness, willful ignorance, and corruption. We find ourselves in brokenness and surrender or we become the boor, the crass materialist, the chosen of God in our own minds, the arrogant ignoramus, the learned fool. And may I say that to one who has read the Great Books, your moral biography and Grail Quest of a Journey from Success to Significance is on the Bunny Slopes of Keirkegaard's mountain. You are so tasteless, dense, complacent, misinformed and arrogant you think we want to hear your life story, your quest for meaning, always accompanied by your growing net worth as an index of goodness? Your plumbing firm, the roto-drain opener, the company that makes life better for all? The dating site? The Facebook clone? Commericializing, owning, selling out, the social as an index of your virtue?" I am sorry for the outburst, forgive me! I know better. "Wiser are the children of darkness than the children of light."
Meaning and truth and godliness are products and services; they are value-add, they are idols of the marketplace, they are brands, avatars, the charisma bestowed on the knave by the fool. Every market clears at a price. These tasteless, dismal attempts at conferring meaning and the glamor of social benefit on money stink in the nostrils of the Most High, but they will sell; and sales and self esteem are now our god. That is how far you imbeciles have sunk, ye who sell your unctious services as Wisdom Consulting or Secular Priesting. Always a greater fool to buy the BS of the lesser, and always the greater charlatan, knave and rogue. If you want art, I have art, rotting beneath my feet. Tens of thousands of moldy pages, decades of study to no purpose whatsoever, ending in ignominy, poverty, and shame.
Come! Read less than one page of great art. If you can stand that I have another. The first link, you pretenders to wisdom, is a direct response to your BS about "The Journey" and your benighted self advertisement as a wise guide. The second is about the old story of shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves played not on a kazoo tuned to the donkey ears of the dunce (whose taste is reflected in your follower count) but on the oak flute of a master who put himself to school reading Horace and Virgil, and has channeled the Vanitas Tradition in a Yankee idiom. Good taste? You bunko artists, congratulating each other on your high class BS; you can't handle good taste. Look at your slack jaw, wandering eyeballs, and dazed look as you stare at art. Yes, good taste is a mountain and it would take you Wise and Virtuous Counsellors to Wealth a lifetime to scale it. One page. Two pages. Did you finish either of the Frost poems before your attention wandered? Before your eyes strayed back to the mirror in which you see the Wise One? As the angels laugh.
Gosh, I am sorry. Look bad taste is fine. On you it looks good, Boss, like the ass's ears on King Midas. I mean good taste is your taste. That is apparent from Your Sixteen Volume History of Self ghostwritten by a PhD from Stanford. Thank you, Mistress, for forgiving your abject slave. To serve you is bliss. I am your Serving Professional. Your Buttboy, Your Loyal Retainer, Trusted Advisor, Wise Counselor, Man of all Work, Scop, Scrivener, Healer, Secular Priest, Astrologer, Dancing Master, Mentor to Heirs, Wealth Manager (not just financial wealth but all wealth including spiritual, social, intellectual, and whatnot), Your Adoptive Son, Your Ego Ideal, Your Moral Jeeves fetching communion wafers under a silver dome, along with consecrated wine, and holy water in a finger bowl with a slice of lemon. All greatness has come from Patronage, O Wondrous Mistress! Patronage, Mistress! Patronage! That laugh! That cackling laugh! And away she strides, in the tailored leather jeans. O! What a wondrous ass! Don't walk away, Mistress. Hear my plea! Her high heels clicking on the marble halls of Wealth Bondage, until silence reigns. At least this time I escaped a whipping.
Forget good taste. Show me the money. I am hungry. What sort of song can I sing to elict a dime from these cold-eyed Bankers, and their UNHW clients? I know "The Bear went over the Moutain." That is a Journey. It may be short enough to hold your attention. What if I sing that? Did you like that one better than Provide Provide. What wondrous taste you have, Mistress!
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