After Bexit, Trump, and Bernie, How goes Dynastic Wealth Planning for Global Citizens?

Certain advisors to billionaire families say their clients live on a kind of Paradise Island, and that the goal of the advisor is to prevent the family from being deported back to the middle class. How, then, will Brexit, and the populist backlash from Trump and Bernie voters filter into the elite cliques advising the world's wealthiest? In short, have our clients, and we ourselves as their trusted advisors, brought it on ourselves? Were we - for real -  trying to create a permanent global dynastic class? Can we be forgiven if we were? Will our clients not ask us, what moral insanity led us to encourage them to live as if an island unto themselves? What sort of education did we have, Doctorate or no Doctorate, that led us to recommend that the ordinary people eat cake? Can we claim that we do not have an independent mind, that we were merely "serving our clients?" That we knew no better? Can we now begin to orient our clients to a world in which the "head" and the "body" of the body politic thrive together, since no part can thrive alone (wisdom that has been obvious since Aesop, but not to wealth & wisdom advisors at the elite conferences, who still find it uncomfortable to discuss their own contribution to social inequality, injustice, and now political instability). How can we have talked so long about Family Constitutions and Family Governance, and failed to ask what kind of polity can long tolerate dynastic families living superbly apart as if on an island? Will we look back in shame?

I find that I am able now to speak so plainly, since a far better qualified person, Patricia Angus, has. It is as if a terrible silence has ended.

Comments

[Christine Egger]

The question becomes: how can we in good conscience continue the work we have been doing?

My answer to this has been a full stop, and it's been painful. My reaching out to you recently was an awkward attempt to reconnect with that part of myself. Everything but the healing work, everything I've been a part of that has touched money -- philanthropy at any scale, impact investing, local economics, everything -- has stopped. I have not been able to figure out how to engage with it with the kind of grace that powers healing. And it is so frustrating to have backed away. It is beyond frustrating to feel answer-less.

[Patricia Angus]

Thank you for adding to the conversation, Phil. These are all vexing questions for clients and advisors alike. One thing we must retain is compassion, even for those who have accumulated (often through inheritance) these resources. Their pain and fear - paradoxical results of the system we have created as a society - are legitimate. For the good of all, we need a broader solution to those challenges, as you note.

[Phil Cubeta]

"Grace that powers healing....." You might be interested in the work of Walter Wink, on Engaging the Powers. A church founded on a fisherman, becomes a transnational enterprise, and the powers it channels include the holy - but also the demons that come with any such worldly human structure. The demons today of the marketplace.... Each with its own name, that of a Brand, each the embodiment of our aspirations, desires, delusions. How to structure our lives "at scale" without losing the human, let alone the holy, and replacing it with metrics, results, double and triple bottom lines and other approximations to death-in-life?
https://www.amazon.com/Engaging-Powers-Discernment-Resistance-Domination/dp/080062646X. When we talk about these issues with those whose humanity was lost, per Brand Manager's plan, in front of screen at nearly birth.... Is it any wonder we feel so alone? Dopamine is the great god Pan come again.

[Phil Cubeta]

Tried to amplify the implicit conversation in a further post on your essay. Yes, "the pain' felt by inheritors for their own suffering and that of others is real. Their "fear" is increasingly appropriate, as well. We must be each other's solution, within a social compact inclusive of us all, or we shall have no solutions at all. To serve the rich without regard to the whole of which they are a part, is to serve dysfunction in which all must suffer. (Their suffering, the rich, is "legitimate," but their power?) Might such a conversation be convened at the highest level wealth conferences for the good of all - inclusive of those we serve? Or will you soon be seeking solace in a Dumpster of your own? It is really not that bad. In many ways people are happier with nothing at all....

[Christine Egger]

Ordered the book. Thank you, Phil. I'm incredibly uncomfortable around the concept of evil. For me, it's a synonym for the absence of light/good/love. Making it more real than that -- reifying it -- strengthens it unnecessarily (counter-productively?). Yet I trust your instincts and advice. Will have it in hand soon.

fwiw I'm not sure we DO structure our lives at scale. We can express love at scale. Everything else is side effect, or at least I can't yet see it as anything other than that.

[Phil Cubeta]

The demonic - a force of its own, as in Greek myth, the madness of Dionysus, the Furies, the hydra, the medusa? Or are those dark forces the fallen angels? Or our bestial nature, our lizard brain? "Lillies that fester smell far worse than weeds," wrote Shakespeare. "None doth offend, none," said King Lear to his Fool in the storm on the heath, but then again he was stark mad as well as stark naked. The world then, as now, "is out of joint." Ill governed, unstable, unjust, and some of us think it feelingly. If the holy resides in the hidden life of the whole, it calls to us in agony.

[Christine Egger]

I think we make up all kinds of stories to describe what it feels like to be distant from our whole/higher/larger-than-this-lifetime-and-persona selves. Some say that the agony is simply an indication of that distance. So I guess my answer would be B, Fallen Angels, if by that you mean our larger, sourced-from-the-universal-we-are-each-a-part-of-and-apart-from perspective. The holy residing in the hidden life of the whole also calls to us in joy, giggles, bliss, and deep contentment. Growing up, I was taught that these are indications of at-one-ment with who we are, and that perspective has served me well. Doesn't bring answers, always, but brings a great deal of comfort. And from that, resilience. And from that, generativeness that serves the next, and so on and so on. Which may just be what this whole life thing is about. Maybe.

[Phil Cubeta]

Quietism, withdrawal, endurance, as the fever burns. A post human world is not beyond God's imagination. I can see why, though, Christine, you may have found Impact Investing and Social Ventures an imperfect vehicle for the holy.

[Christine Egger]

I can see why, too

[Phil]

What might you try next?

[Christine Egger]

Just healing, for now. And being. The kind that draws on a tap root that extends through this world and into the next. Anything else seems to rely on ego or wealth or control or stability. aka, they're all side effects, not a primary aim.

It isn't easy, but it seems the most worthwhile (and I'm working on making it easier).

[Phil Cubeta]

One of the things I am gently exploring is Quaker Circles, patterned on the work of Parker Palmer, at The Center for Courage and Renewal, in which those who have most, can come without being handled, managed or sold, to reconnect, if they can, to that great taproot, or their own inner teacher. Metrics, there will be none.... What can be measured and managed is what is killing us. We have made the means and the management of them into our highest ends. We live to measure and manage, towards any goal however obtuse, however unexamined, however self deluded. We are afraid of silence because it echoes with our own emptiness.

[Christine Egger]

Grateful for the reminder of Parker Palmer's work, and thrilled that you are gently exploring this. A resounding yes to everything you have said here. It isn't that measuring and managing are bad. It's doing those things WITHOUT first being at peace with silence, without that connection to taproot, that causes harm (I think).

I was only in pure silence once. At about 15,000 ft or so, at a base camp in the Himalaya. Turns out when everything else is silent, the sound of our blood swooshing through our bodies is LOUD. Who knew? We're not so empty.

[Phil]

So we are not so empty..... I wonder how the SOCAP folks would do with Quaker circles? Depend who is in them? Can we mix and intermix without discomfort and strife? Seems to be getting harder.

[Christine Egger]

I'm counting on -- and striving for, in my own way -- comfort on the far side of discomfort.

And yes, I'd say it depends.

[Phil Cubeta]

When the spirit is hijacked for an agenda not her own, those who know the difference go numb. Takes time for the chill to wear off.

[Christine Egger]

Making my way back from that numbness is taking both time and a good therapist. I want to go back in the ring differently. It's been an interesting process. Feeling cautiously optimistic.

[Phil Cubeta]

Even Parker Palmer's group operates as it must inside Wealth Bondage: Aligning Soul and Role. Clarity Circles and Circles of Trust are trademarked. I am sure their is a rationale for that. Wish the Catholic Church had trade marked "The Holy Spirit," it might have saved us from the Reformation. If Simony is the sin of selling holy things, and if the sin against the holy ghost is one sin that cannot be forgiven, it is no wonder to me that you went numb. You couldn't sell the spirit or pretend her other name if Mammon, or that the two are actually one. The spirit died within, for that moment, so she could live for another day. She rightly withdrew. When she returns who knows if might be as gentle breeze, or like a hurricane. We have courted her using as bait wealth and preferment. And guess what, she will not take it, but she will have a lesson for us to learn.

[Christine Egger]

Thank you, Phil