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The Role of the Royal Eunuch in Preserving Dynastic Families, Historically Considered, with Application to Current Times

In ancient times, a hot-blooded conqueror would sack a city, and his soldiers would share in the spoils: rapine and plunder. The conqueror might then establish a harem to grow, preserve and perpetuate his dynasty. The most trusted advisor was a eunuch. Thank God, in our time it is different. More later, after my lobotomy.

Consigliere and Priest

I have many colleagues and friends in Wealth Bondage - this part is literally true - who one day say they are a Secular Priest to Dynastic Wealth, the next day say they are Moral Mentors or Role Models, and the next day say they are the family's Consigliere. I mean a Consigliere is a crook advising a mob family, a counselor who engages in extortion, murder, torture, and the systematic perversion of justice. Well, I guess all that is consistent. A lot of the Medici Popes were like that. Certain Archbishops. Maybe one or two Supreme Court Justices. I think, though, the fantasy element here is that a Consigliere, like Tom, in The Godfather was an attorney who got almost adopted into the family as a son. I can see how that might have some appeal. I notice myself the more I must lick the ground in the presence of wealth and power, the higher my fantasies fly. Once, I dreamt I married Queen Isabella of Spain, having served her loyally for many years as a dwarf. Another time, The Dumpster became The Santa Maria, and I woke up thinking Wall Street was Plymouth Rock. Once I woke up dreaming Tutor was John Smith and I was Pocahontas, and the Dumpster was our teepee, but that is another story. We all need fantasy or we would go crazy. 

How an obscure adviser to Pat Buchanan predicted the wild Trump campaign in 1996

Reading this, I wonder about my colleagues, and fellow Wise Counselors,  in Wealth Bondage, who dedicate their lives hardly less miserable than my own, to assuaging the harms, largely self-inflicted, suffered, in the midst of abundance, by colossally wealthy people. I wonder about advisors who write about Wealth and the Will of God to cultivate Private Bankers. And those who write about an island, a paradise, open only to the wealthy, from which those who do not get good advice (hint, hint) may be deported back to the middle class.

It not just that the wealthy elite are losing control of the Republican party; the country is losing the consent of the increasingly rancorous governed.  It is sad that it takes a trash-talking billionaire, a casino operator,  to rally the South, the faithful, the remnants of the middle class, the angry, endlessly manipulated patriots, and those who once had jobs, let alone unions.

Reading in my field, (Building Wealth Bondage to Last) as I do daily, holed up in Dumpster at the Corner of Wealth and Bondage, I feel as if I were alive under some decayed monarchy, reading courtiers, less well educated than they think they are, talking to fellow courtiers about service to the nobles, without any idea that the world is crashing in upon them.

Our roles as paid liars is to tell bigger and better lies, my friends, to not only preserve but to justify obscene wealth. As workaday intellectuals, paid by the hour, project or day, we need a big lie to the effect that through Flourishing Families worth billions, all citizens will flourish. Art is high class lying. Virgil, Horace, Dryden, all praised the King or Emperor as gods - not plausibly, but they got patronage and preferment! Why cannot we rise to that in praise of our dynastic clients, in the presence of the credulous rabble?

Luncheon Meat Casserole

Inevitably, what readers of my post on Matt Wesley's recipe (for healthier families of great wealth) really want is my recipe for luncheon meat casserole for inconsequential families of no wealth. Honestly, I have no such recipe, but I can create one if readers can pool their assets and buy me some luncheon meat, a box of macaroni, and a pot. Maybe we can get a grant to buy the stove, too, and even an shelter of some kind to cook under.

Matt Wesley on Family Culture with Phil's Family Recipe for Luncheon Meat Casserole

If you as a wealth holder, advisor, or citizen have an interest in the closed world of planning  for the uber-wealthy, essentially centamillionaires and up, and are looking for a quick, but leading edge, introduction, you might read these two posts by Matt Wesley.

Playing the Long Game

Playing the Long Game:In the Beginning

In talks to advisors, at conferences on Wealth and Wisdom, or such,  I sometimes ask: "Are your best practices the solution or the problem?"  Matt is more tactful, better informed, and more balanced. But his point, up to a point, is much the same: Advisors create structures serving wealth, but then the family must live in the shadow of those structures.

Why should you as a citizen care? Why not read instead an article like how to reduce your credit card debt? Or how to pay off your student loans? Or how to stretch Social Security payments? Or how buying two pair of pants with one suit jacket can save you money in the long run? Or how to cut your own hair? Or how to make a casserole out of macaroni and luncheon meat? Here is why: Governing Families Govern. Ruling Families Rule. Flourishing Families as that term is used in Uber-Wealth Planning circles do not include yours. Resourceful Women are not bag ladies, forced to survive under difficult circumstances. Your mother may be resourceful, but not in the sense of Resourceful, if you see what I mean? Full of Financial Resources?

The reason to take an interest in Audrey is that she will be your Queen. How she adapts to Master Jack, and a Trust Fund with 51% of the world's wealth, will determine how you and your fellow peons and serfs, the common people, "hard working Americans," live in the future, and until the end of time. That is what Dynastic Wealth Planning is about. It is written for insiders by insiders. It is hidden in plain sight. Rather, you are hidden - you are not even visible in a tour bus, or mowing the lawn, or suckling the wealth owner's child. You are invisible to great wealth, and great wealth and its culture and folkways are invisible to you.

Matt is a JD, with background in estate planing. He is fluent in the humanities. He has a Divinity Degree. I don't see any indication that he is currently tormented by the Gospels, at least not that part of the Gospels that say we find the divine in the faces of the oppressed. By oppressed, or subordinated, he means trust fund babies who are subordinated to legal structures created by less enlightened planners. By subordinated, or oppressed, he does not mean you, either. By culture at war with structure, he does not mean your culture, or American culture generally, nor does he mean democracy in tension with, say, oligarchy. He means solely the culture of wealth and privilege doing its best in the shadow of massive funds in multi-generational trusts. What has that got to do with you? Nothing. You don't have a trust fund, so you don't have to worry about it. Not your problem. Matt and Master Jack will handle mentoring Heirs to Rule a World in which you are Invisible.

I am good with it. Audrey will own, rule, and save the world she inherits. Better her than some I could name.  Wish Tutor well with her, so that she will one day control the trusts that control the world, rather than her having to live under the passive aggressive control of a corporate trustee.  If she exerts control, she will save us all, as she rescued Rex from the pound. Hey, look! This is the best I can do within the constraints of Children's Story. I know it is absurd. Does Matt?

Blockchain and the Future of Philanthropy

White paper and infographic from CAF America. (Hat tip to Jon Husband.)

Sustainable Injustice - A Tool Kit for Trusted Advisors to Extremely Wealthy Families

In the asylum for Wealth and Wisdom Consultants to the world's wealthiest, where I spent some time awhile back, recovering from my third lobotomy (thank God I am almost normal now), I saw a madman with a pile of old papers, scribbled over and over. All I could make out was the title, "Sustainable Injustice: a Toolkit for Flourishing Families with a Billion or More." The subtitle was Wealth and the Will of God as Found in a Bank Ledger. It was spooky, frankly. I am glad to get released back into the real world, where I am able to help dynastic families flourish in an earthly paradise of their own. In competition with each other, if all goes well, they will eventually consolidate, like corporations, or Medieval Fiefdoms, until we have one Queen or King to rule us. If I can help The Happy Tutor mentor the world's wealthiest child, so that she grows up to care for all she owns, the poorest among us, and all creatures, great and small, I will have done God's work.  O my poor stomach! It must be something I ate. It is not Audrey's fault her mother, Tess, owns a controlling interest in the world. Audrey is a good kid. When others love her as much as I do, and she is Good Queen Audrey, we will finally have something good that unites us all in common purpose. Maybe it is the flu. I am not feeling well. How do you feel? You probably should not get too close to me. I may be contagious.

Reading Symptoms - "Philanthropy" Erased but Legible

The Family Wealth Sustainability Toolkit, by Fredda Herz Brown, PhD and Fran Lottery PhD.

I have seldom gained as much, sentence by sentence, from any book in the field of family wealth counseling.  That is just as well since the book is 102 pages long and has a list price of $125 (I got it second hand for less). The authors have decades of lived experience in working with uber-wealthy families. The book leads into an online assessment tool, with several dimensions that a wealthy family (measuring net worth in fractions or multiples of billions) should consider. Now, my Fellow Americans, read the passage below, and reflect:

Surprisingly, we learned that one dimension we had included, philanthropy (or giving), was considered both by families and many colleagues to be a value statement on our part. We removed that dimension but felt strongly that the items be included, so we preserved them under the two dimensions of family legacy and connection, and human capital and development.

That passage speaks volumes for the state of our society where so few have so much;  so many have so little; and the highest calling of wealth advisors to billionaires is to be trusted advisors, giving good advice and no offense, so that billionaire families remain "sustainable" for generations even as the communities around them fail. The authors deserve credit for this little exercise in communication, like prisoners in a Dungeon in Wealth Bondage, tapping, tapping, tapping -- is anyone there?  They do delete "philanthropy," but they leave the trace of the word where the eraser went. Read Gifthub in that light. It is the writing and erasure of what must not be said.

Symptoms speak to the physician. Hives and pustules. A red rash. Welts. Itchy skin. A heaving stomach. Racing heart. Lock jaw. Despair. Uncontrollable laughter. That is how a passage like the one quoted above is best read. The truth, like a psychosomatic disease in the body politic, is making itself felt like a lump growing larger by the day.

You in the next cell! Tap, tap, tap. What cell?   What is he talking about? Exactly. Write and erase so that you have no idea.

How God and Mammon make Common Cause in Wealth Bondage to do the Most Good

I spend a lot of personal time (since I am unemployed ) thinking about “calling” in the context of love, grace, and gratitude. That is a very different economy, the economy of love, and it does not obey the logic of the market. The pearl of great price is tossed away, as having no value. The swine, preferring slops, not only spit out pearls, they gore the one who strews them. Most seed falls on infertile ground, and perishes to no purpose. The floor of the arena is soaked in the blood of the martyrs. Building a public good, and building a private good may at times converge, but they often diverge, too.

Serving “two masters” is possible like riding two horses in a circus, if the horses are well trained, and you as an acrobat are limber and nimble, as I am not. Yet there are times when God and Mammon do run side by side. Double bottom line businesses might sometimes be a case in point. The naive think it is easy, and the cynical are happy to sell them their own illusions. (Look who is talking, in Wealth Bondage that was my job. If I had been better at it, I might still be drawing a legitimate paycheck rather than caging Wealth and Wisdom Gigs behind the Dumpster.) When God and Mammon part company, and Stanford Social Innovation Review gives us the metrics, we shall all be a little older and a little wiser. I fear that many of those who end up richer, will be those whose first success was, say, packaging mortgage bonds - they too were once hailed as a double bottom line business, helping capital markets and helping poor folks get a home.

The view that God loves Mammon and measures His success in business metrics is very popular with those who have or wish they could have money. The language of love, grace and gratitude, comes and goes as the spirit wills. It cannot be compelled, any more than can the vernal breeze, but when it blows it may rise to a hurricane. And when it lies still.... well, read "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner." Living death.

There is no Secret Subtext, pass it On

At bedtime, Audrey tells Tutor, "I told Momma I guessed the secret subtext." "What did she say?," Tutor whispers in alarm. "She said there is no secret subtext. Just 'own rule save.' No 'and get even.'" "Of course she said that," Tutor whispers, "What do you expect?" "Tsk, Tsk," Momma murmurs from her easy chair, "What utter nonsense." "Audrey," Tutor breathes, "What do we both know?" Then he and Audrey like choreographed Vaudeville artists, both shake their heads back and forth, noses almost touching, holding up one forefinger: "There is no secret subtext!," then "Shhhsssh!" Momma says, "Tutor, please; it is way past Audrey's bedtime; don't get her going again. She needs to sleep."