Matt Wesley is maybe the first from within the field of family governance (the highest level counseling given to the highest wealth families) to actually engage with Gifthub publicly. He sees that most of the posts here for at least the last five years have been tormented by the themes of wealth disparity and the rise of a new.... aristocracy? plutocracy? oligarchy? nobility? And the rise of a new kind of advisor, one more like a privy counselor, or henchman, or consilgiere, or svengali, or wise person, or shaman, or moral mentor, or secular priest. (As The Happy Tutor says: "A most trusted advisor is a fool and knave who declares himself wise and virtuous and finds dupes who believe it." I tell Tutor, "It takes one to know one." To which his response is, "If I had duped the world's wealthiest into considering me wise and virtuous, and paying me accordingly, would I be living naked in a Dumpster turning tricks in a Dungeon for short money at my age?" Since Tutor is going on one thousand years old, I hope he can soon give it a rest.)
Whatever the new forms of the polity, and of advisors to power are, they are presaged in ancient Greece and Rome, in the Dark Ages under feudalism, in the Augustan England of Empire, in our own Gilded Age, and maybe in the slave holding South, and not just the South. Washington and Jefferson owned slaves. I attempt satire, in part, because satire (and parable, fable, allegory, just so story, nursery rhyme, Rabelaisian cock and bull story) has always been the form that emerges under conditions of great social disparities, where a trusted advisor who tells moral truth openly is a damn Fool. The Plantation owners did not patronize urbane satires of themselves, as far as I know, but they did have Cakewalk at the Big House which, like satire, is a carnivalesque interlude to periodically turn the world upside down, to let the last be first, and the first last, and to let the meek or enslaved inherit, if only to further humiliate them, and to refresh the patterns of domination. What the slaves say in the hush arbor may be overheard, but not heard. The good Master allows just enough slack.
B'rer Fox made a tar baby.....
Matt knows Gifthub is a Tar Baby and was willing to touch it, and for that I am grateful. Let Matt be a lesson to the rest of you.
Phil, Yours is a darker take on things, but we ignore Shadow at our and our client's peril. My take is much sunnier, but I do believe there is healthy power to be found in the willingness to wrestle with the angels through the darkness of night.It is by this that we are renewed and renamed, albeit with a bit of a limp. See Gen. 32:22-31.
Posted by: Matt Wesley | September 25, 2015 at 04:43 PM
Yes, it is certainly best to stay positive.
Posted by: Phil Cubeta | September 25, 2015 at 06:54 PM