Gift Hub

The Myth of Economic Injustice - Call for Papers by Wealth Bondage Foundation

Dear sweet Albert Ruesga - Philanthropy for Social Justice and Peace. What a sweet combination. Every time I read it, I see him in short pants looking indignant and apologetic, obedient to a fault. It is ok, Albert! I know you are harmless. I love his work.  If any of you losers want to take a survey on how funders can better help the poor, the downtrodden, the fleeced, and those the real world has left behind, Albert has provided this helpful link. I did the survey, for laughs. I recommended improved communication with Billionaires. Hey, guess what? We have the freaking money! Albert and salaried grant maker friends with Foundations want want peace? I want peace. Things are going well. Why rock the boat? We all want peace. The Myth of Economic Injustice. Great title for a convening. They could interview me. - Candidia Cruikshanks, Mistress, Founder and CEO of The Wealth Bondage Foundation for Distributive Justice and Peace. She adds, "I got mine, Sweetie, if you want some, write me a grant proposal, and send a copy to my assistant. My salaried grantmaker will be sure to get back to you promptly. Your sense of injustice is important to me, really it is.  Let me read your heartfelt proposal. So moving! I am touched, deeply touched. And so well documented! I am writing the check now..... Ooops so sorry! I was going to give you a million dollars to rectify economic injustice in Wealth Bondage, but then it hit me! No! I should give it to world peace. Pepper spray - a million dollars for pepperspray. I invest in proven solutions. Peace. Try again next year. Just keep working on that grant proposal! Next year, you may get the million. Or the year after. Look!  See me flapping? I am the pig that flies.

Wise Advice on Morals Counselling by a Man of High Character

I do have friends, generally with degrees in the liberal arts from places that still teach the great books in the tradition of Alan Bloom, or Leo Strauss, who do well and do good in Wisdom Consulting for some pretty impressive families. I caught up with one at a recent Conference on Cultivating Our Patrons' Virtue. He was speaking on Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics. I was exhibiting for my mentor, The Happy Tutor's side business, selling fraternity house paddles. My friend dropped by the booth and gave me some needed perspective. "Phil," he said, "Somewhat against my better judgement, I do read your blog from time to time, not that I read you to gloat over your humiliation but in compassion for the mess you made of your life. I note that you are always bitching about living in the dumpster and having no morals tutorial clients and how in your declining years you are still handing out towels in the sauna in Wealth Bondage rather than running the Chapel, having been passed over as Sexton and Secular Priest, for ex-Fr. Brennan, before his recent imprisonment for financial fraud (making off with the offering). And now they have an executive search firm looking for his replacement and you did not even make the short list. Let me share with you: It is not that you are Foolish rather than Wise; your harmless act is amusing to our patrons. The problem, Phil, is that you lack character." As soon as he said it I saw why he commands $200,000 fees for one day wisdom consultations to some of the world's wealthiest. He is exactly right. After 30 years in Wealth Bondage prostituting all that I hold holy, and blogging about it drunkenly, how can I come across as a man of Good Character? As Aristotle noted, pathos and logos and even ethos only get you so far. In the end it is character that persuades. I am going to be more like my friend, in public. First step is a pair of trousers.

Contemptus Mundi Spray-Painted on My Dumpster

I have a wise friend who reminds me that Non-Catholics see Wealth Bondgage differently. Moll Flanders is an Entrepreneur. Pilgrim makes Progress. God favors those who are Enterprising. In the 18th century patronage of the arts gave way to markets, as house maids and shopkeepers learned to read what Grubstreet produced. Sales volume became the standard of success. So, today, whether secular or protestant we believe or wish to believe that Wealth Bondage is next to Godliness. There is no reason to choose between Flesh and Spirit, high road or low road, profit and doing good, Caeasar's image or God's image, gilded idols, brands, gods, or human desires; all make a market and, through the Hidden Hand,  Virtue Prevails, all sins of omission and comission paid for in advance, in a Divine Bailout of morally bankrupt humanity. Wealth Bondage, then, is perfect Freedom. We serve best by serving ourselves. I do not deny it; in fact I insist upon it. Wealth Bondage is a rebus - seen one way, it is a crass, reductive, soul-destroying,  market for all that is holy, obscene, grostesque, tasteless, thoughtless, enthusiastic, popular, and profitable. Seen another way it is a satiric celebration of same. In this way I inhabit flesh and spirit as one man, a Pilgrim between two worlds, chained to the earth that I might yearn for heaven; chained to heaven that I might yearn towards earth, held tight by both chains, strangled by both. You say that is Catholic? Not Stoic? I did steal it, but the source is Kafka, a secular Jew.

Markets for Good and Whatever Else You Got

The Convening

We had a symposium (we like to call it) in the Dumpter last night with me and my imaginary friends drawn from the books below my feet, long since unread, but providing a degree of protection against the cold in winter, and against rain in summer, if I burrow into them.  Our topic, to which Blake, John Dewy, Dickens, Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and Michael Edwards, or their imaginary avatars, contributed with great energy was The Future of Good. We did reach a consensus which I see fit to share with the world at large, insofar as the world sticks its head into the dumpster and hears my faint voice, mumbling.

Our Findings

• The Future of Good is corporate. The social will be mined and owned with wealth moving into fewer hands, the hands of those who own, manage, and control, govern in fact, the life world formerly known as civil society.
• The rich will get richer as Dynastic Wealth Consultants teach Wisdom, dispensed as advertising, marketing, think tank thinking, and family legacy brand building to those who lead us into markets that we might not hunger or thirst.
• Through the assistance of their Consigliere, corporate and then dynastic wealth will capture and suborn all three branches of government.
• The humans producing and produced by this Market for Good, will be the Future of Good - with no language or literary imagination other than money, investment, markets, and brand narratives. (Four Capitals, Social Return on Investment, Balanced Scorecards, The Hero's Journey to Success and Significance).
• Impact investing ("why not make a good buck and do good?  Why be a sucker and give money away when you can do more good buying our Future of Good Impact Investing Index Fund?") will supplant much philanthropy.
• Nonprofits will become more businesslike to package themselves in Markets for Good as result getting investments.
• By way of counter trend, more will join religious organizations, or create their own religious aura, some for purposes of branding, some to escape into fantasy, some as compensatory, but many because in houses of worship the Text still speaks, in mysterious ways, to humanity as the sea to the ambiphian.
• The struggle to brand Truth, Beauty, Virtue, Wisdom and the Holy will vie with ego and orgasm as the highest impulses to which purchases (and identity via purchase) can be tied.
• Wisdom Consultants, finding their membership exceeding the demand, and wanting to raise professional standards, will develop a Code of Professional Ethics, a Canon, bylaws,  a 1,000 question objective test, and a five star rating system, to distinguish themselves from amateurs, cranks, sycophants, and charlatans.
• The phrase Wisdom Consultant will be trademarked. Lists of Wisdom Consultants stripped of their title for violations of professional conduct will be published. Conventions of Wisdom Consultants will be held.  Annual awards to the Wisest in sundry categories will be given. 
• America's Got Wisdom will help aspiring wealth consultants achieve fame, and they will find clients among the winners of lotteries or rising families. But the real work of dynastic wealth counseling will be done behind the scenes, for very few, who own the show.  

Waking to a Hangover

With dawn, and the inevitable hangover, my imaginary friends disappear back into their Tomes, and another day begins of restless and fruitless begging. If I would afford an accordian, I could be a busker, if I knew how to play. Maybe I can get a micro-loan to advance my social entrepreneurship.

 

American Oligarchy and Public Policy

American Oligarchy: How the Preferences of Elites Shape Policy Outcomes.  How does concentrated wealth shape policy? Through the four capitals: wisdom, virtue, public-spiritedness, and prayer. The wealthy hire secular priests to impart wisdom and instill virtue, and promote public-spiritedness in the heirs and to pray night and day for tax reduction, regulatory rollbacks, bailouts, favorable taxation on the carried interest in hedgefunds and other policies that will help the Great Silver Beech of dynastic wealth flourish for one hundred years. God being just, and the dynastic rich remaing wise and virtuous, and public spirited, due to the work of Secular Priests, prayers are answered. Actually, there is a whole syllabus on this viewpoint, and many conferences, and all kinds of warring factions, as in Christianity for that matter, about who is in the Real Secular Priest lineage, and who is an imposter, or apostate. (Mountebanks battling over who is the True Bunko Artist descended Apostolically from The Source of all Sense.) It is getting to the point where the secular priest business has become a revolving door into Wall Street, and the DC lobbying firms. Bringing that level of wisdom and virtue and public spiritedness and secular spirituality to these centers of power is probably good for democracy somehow. Trickle down. That may be it. Virtue will trickle down. The poor will become better and they will rise through honest toil. Just as the rich would have fallen had they been less than Saints. All is as it should be, in this, the best of all possible worlds, as Pangloss explained to Pollyanna.  

Is Family Governance open to a Manly Man like me?

Having committed murder, Heracles, for punishment, was given for a sentencing term to a woman as a slave. She dressed the dim, muscular brute as a woman. Likewise, Thor was dressed as a girl by Loki, the trickster hero. I mention this as my recent post on Family Governance as Home Ec has drawn many emails from very distinguished men, some of the leading lights in the booming Dynastic Family Governance business (or calling), asking if they have to become Big Sissies if they are to be taken seriously in the art of Household Governance, or Home Ec. I am not sure; I do know that wearing a short skirt has not hurt me in my own pursuit of Excellence, in Wealth Bondage, particularly when I was younger and had better legs, but I do think it is a promising sign if the Wise Counselor, who is male, has studied literature, or ballet, or has a degree in divinity, or has a spiritual practice like Buddhism, or is good with children, and enjoys painting faces, making glittery cards, playing hide and seek, reading stories at bedtime, or has nursery rhymes by heart.  

By contrast, much of the male-dominated family governance writing, it seems to me, is indebted to Machiaveli and to Leo Strauss, double coded with a wink and nod, about both family governance (for the rubes to read with a sentimental nod) and about governance of the polity by means of the Flourishing Family's Four Clouts: Personal, Financial, Political and Whatever Else Money Buys through Patronage and favor trading. It sometimes seems reading these politic writers that Family is, at least in their fantasy life, the front behind which they imagine themselves running some kind of secret cabal, or shadow cabinet, as wise counselors to the Medicis, Romanovs, Bourbons, or the Corleone Family. Mentoring the idiot princess, serving as the Regent, privy counselor, Moral Role Model, sauve ambassador, Broker of Deals, Protector, Pandar, Guide to Ardent Youth, and even  as a Secular Priest in the event that an authentic cleric cannot be found, or is found to be abrasive. Some even like to say they are consiglieres. (Some given the nature of this work may, for all I know, actually be consiglieres, or whatever is the word for that in Russian, Chinese, Thai, or Spanish.) 

As a human by birth, gendered male, I am struck in Aristotle by the Manliness of the slave-owning Aristocrat whose best student (Alexander the Great) still holds the world record for world conquest (innovation, disruption, rapine, pillage, plunder, and colonization) in the under 40 category. If we are, though, to heal the world by healing a few flourishing families (which seems in itself a bit of a stretch), we will have to get in touch with our feminine side, so that we really do heal the moral insanity, and so the good spreads from the great families to the lesser families on down to the least among us, until the world is healed, not just subdued. We may not be convincing as females, but cross-dressing as such would make our prose read better, for what it is, a new chapter in the Human Comedy. 

In working on giving, in asking questions of successful men, often in their fifties through seventies, I have noticed a moment, when a wealthy and powerful man's mask slips, and in a kind reverie, or moment in and out of time, his manner changes, his voice changes, he cites a text or a story, and then mentions his mother, sometimes sheepishly looking at his hands. That is, I have come to feel, how the world will be healed through flourishing families if it can be healed that way at all, through the presence in the decision makers at the moment of truth of the voice of the divine feminine, as that voice is channeled through the holy spirit, through the muses and graces, and localized in the memory (Mnemosyne, the mother of the muses) of a mother who taught the prayers, read the stories, made the glittery cards with the kid, and may in her own time and place have governed nothing whatsoever (other than the future) as the manly men spoke of plunder, metrics, governance, connections, preferment, wealth, war, and power. We as a species under extreme stress, in an ecosystem struggling, are in the hands of the woman; whether to save or console, whether to witness, lead, or govern; they, now in their turn, as a new generation of leaders, in the house and in the seats of power, have the next leg of the journey. If short skirts are in fashion, we men must do what we can do keep up. Until we listen, we will not learn. (As I have been told by every woman I know, in a voice that becomes louder and louder until I say, What?) 

Is Family Governance a branch of Home Ec?

Properly considered could Dynastic Family Governance be a branch of Home Economics? In asking a few distinquished friends, both male and female, they are agreed on only one point: that I for asking should be beaten half to death. So what else is new.  I should butt out. Family Dumpster Governance. Here I rule in solitary splendor, with a rotting orange as my globe, a bag of garbage as my throne, and a ruined umbrella as my sceptre. A Lord of Misrule, long after Carnival is over. Next Mardi Gras, I will dress in a hula skirt and offer wise counsel to those masquerading as kings and queens. Maybe that will go over better, depending on how much we all drink.  Which reminds me, can you spare a dime?

Rousting Homeless Jesus

Via NPR.

Serving Professional As Adoptive Scion of Wealth

I am told on good report that in the dynastic families who can afford to employ a Trusted Retainer, Man or Woman of all Work, Trusted Morals Consultant, Wise Counselor, or Secular Priest, that the advisor may become almost a member of the family. Having no personal reference point in this fabulously growing world of dynasties I wonder if Mammy in Gone with the Wind would be such an adoptive family member, only today the Serving Professional, down to the Valet, or the wet nurse, has freely chosen her or his role, however elevated or debased. Then I recalled that The Happy Tutor himself my ego ideal and role model, was a cleric in the employ of an Ancient Family, a household priest, a teacher, a disciplinarian, and a fool, to judge by the Cap and Bells pushed back on his neck in this engraving by Holbein for Erasmus's The Praise of Folly. So, everything old is new again, and serve we must, in places high or low. I would rather be whipped in the drawing room than in the stable. And if my Mistress were to adopt me, for my good behavior, and a lifetime of confidential services, I would only hope to inherit a child's portion, which would amount, to about 1/3rd of the world's wealth, of which I would be a Good Steward in my turn, employing others to Serve me Professionally. So, turnabout is Fair Play.

Vicarious Status among Serving Professionals

"I have often noted," said the Happy Tutor, Dungeon Master to the Stars in Wealth Bondage, "that the maids in the bigger houses look down on those who serve in the smaller." This observation has been corroborated for me by one of the most highly regarded trusted advisors to the world's wealthiest families (by confidential personal communication).