The Happy Tutor, my friend and mentor, Dungeon Master to the Stars in Wealth Bondage, actually does serve as the moral mentor, and pander, to a dynastic family, who built their wealth disrupting among other things the trade in blood. While blood donations are still made charitably, the company founded by this family makes the market, and takes a percentage. They are helping promote the sharing economy. They are doing the most good. They have a spreadsheet to prove it.
I caught up with Tutor in the servant's quarters of the family's compound on an island off the coast of Canada. I asked him how he felt about devoting his life to promoting the well being of those who already have most. How did that square with his own lowly origins, and commitment to democracy, and the life of the street? His answer may be of interest to others who have gone down this route; I don't find it plausible, but it is consoling.
What Tutor said, with an inscrutable face, is that only great wealth in a few hands is conducive, through education, and leisure, and patronage, and careful breeding with other very smart and capable people, to the creation of High Culture, as in the days of the Medicis, or the Bourbon Kings. With Good Taste. And meals at High Table. And real Art, not just the crap you see in the mall. He said he would rather live as a Servant to Wealth, or as a Pimp, or Pander, or Butler, or Morals Tutor, Trusted Advisor, Concierge, Man of all Work, Dancing Master, Svengali, or Spiritual Guide to a Flourishing wealthy family, raising their level of culture, from whatever starting point, however low and crass and commercial to begin with, than to live in a world where everyone is like the riffraff (the actually existing 'demos,' as he called it) you see on Twitter, Facebook and Linked-In. "Phil," he said to me, "be honest; would you rather work with one crass, market demented family, the very epitome of Wealth Bondage, whose children or grandchildren might some day acquire culture and taste, or would you rather spend your life educating the empty, ordinary heads of those whose children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, will be left behind, a permanent middling class of morons, with a positive mental attitude? Do you really want to spend your best years sharing their selfies, links and motivational quotations? Earning their 'likes,' when you could be making bank tutoring the scions of wealth who own the platform on which the morons entertain each other? What is the highest hope of humanity if it is not the creation and preservation of a leisured cultivated ruling elite, in a paradise of their own? It is through such efforts that ours becomes a noble trade."
I think he is bullshitting me, but I am not sure. It is pretty much the same kind of bullshit I hear from the platform in many high end wealth planning conferences, but not so well expressed. It takes hundreds of years to create an Ancient, a man of Taste, like Tutor. We Moderns still have a long way to go.
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