Generational Wealth

Don't Give Money to People Who Hate You
banking family

A commenter writes:

Are the elites who are running this of the same quality of mind as their great and great great grandparents who started much of this at the turn of the century?

My impression is the current crop is lacking in patience, and is not as equipped as past generations even though they have more wealth and influence at their disposal. I know some of these families have been running the show in the background for some 500 years (putting the lie to the Chinese proverb…or indicating Satanic allegiance for such a Catholic Church like preservance) but everything happening feels more haphazard, more rushed rather than a true seizing of the moment than 1917. Am I missing something?

My outlook largely aligns with Devon Stack on the matter. Our rulers’ worldly power is the legacy of vast generational wealth their forefathers accumulated decades–even centuries–ago. Their inheritance gives them a nigh-insurmountable advantage in the realms of temporal wealth and influence. This is why, for example, no one has succeeded in creating a viable alternative to any of the Big Tech platforms.

Stack’s analogy is apt. Imagine time as a 500 k marathon track where each kilometer represents one year. It’s a relay race where each runner passes the baton to his kid, who gets to start at the point where his dad finished.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that all our ancestors started on the same line 500 km/years back from us. Due to differences in natural ability, training, and dumb luck, some of the racers pulled ahead. But the others still had a chance to catch up if they pushed themselves. But the math says that at least some of front runners’ kids would maintain their fathers’ lead, and in some cases expand it.

Eventually, some of the 3rd and 4th generation runners way out front would run over the horizon from those trailing behind. A number of them would realize that no one would know if they cheated. So, some of them would indulge the temptation to stop running on foot and hop in golf carts. Their already wide lead, which a runner farther back might have been able to overcome with supreme effort, would double. And when no chance existed of anyone discovering their cheating, the golf cart drivers would switch to sports cars, then bullet trains, then supersonic jets.

What are the odds that the succeeding generations who never had to train, but got to ride out the race on the Concord, are as fit as their ancestors who started running?

This is why we see such gross mismanagement in every sector of commerce. Our rulers have inherited an almost omnipotent machine, but they no longer remember how it works. They have degenerated into a cargo cult that tries to appease the machine with blood rituals and sacrifices.

The machine is incredibly resilient–it was built to be–but one day it will stop. We must make ready for that moment.

In the meantime, don’t give money to people who hate you.

Don't Give Money to People Who Hate You - Brian Niemeier

11 Comments

  1. Durandel

    I figured all of Western man has degenerated naturally, as an ongoing consequence of the Fall – I don’t think many of us are greater than our ancestors 500 years ago or more and very likely we are less than them in body, mind and spirit – but I wanted to know if the Descendents were less adept at wielding their inheritance because of their easy lives. Thank you for answering my question.

    And to anyone reading this, check out Stack’s channel on Bitchute. He makes some great content.

    • Brian Niemeier

      You are welcome.

    • xavier

      Durandel

      An exemplar is Singapore. The PM years ago riffing off his dad stated there are natural aristocrat (of which implicitly he's one)
      My retort is there are no aristocrats in a republic.

      Social mobility is a recurring issue but short of booting out the governing party and engaging a purge it's utterly hopeless.

      Singapore has combined the Imperial chinese exam system with British old boys network. And come out the worst for them

      xavier

  2. M. Bibliophile

    This is a fractal problem. You see it in micro and macro and eventually the wheels will fall off. When it happens piecemeal, businesses fail and Houses fall. When it clusters, empires collapse. When it happens all at once, civilizations crumble. Sometimes it can be arrested by competent men exploiting it for their own head start, but too often for my comfort there is no one who can step up or worse, the failing and flailing lines concentrate on breaking the threats to their fading power first. I fear that we are looking at this situation now at the very least in the US if not the world. The 20th century was a capstone to at least 200 years of decline whose seeds were sown centuries earlier. The resultant blood baths and runaway automation have left us running on fumes and the religious and cultural rot has us getting high off those fumes rather than using them to find more fuel.

    • Brian Niemeier

      Avoid crowds.

  3. Zaklog the Great

    There is some evidence that this may not be the case. Merely dropping money on poor people doesn't seem to help them that much. I'm not sure why the mechanism of doing so by inheritance rather than lottery would make that much difference. Now, if it's a matter of knowledge and skills being passed down, that's another thing entirely, and complaining about that seems to be veering into Marxism.

    The land lottery of 1832 and generational non-transfer

    • Zaklog the Great

      Having thought about it a little bit, I will amend my comment. There is also social connections and status, which can be passed down and which do not connote any meaningful virtue whatsoever. That's still not quite the same as inherited wealth, however.

    • Brian Niemeier

      Stack's original exposition of this phenomenon is based on extensive documentation. For instance, the recent discovery of old papers in a Vienna bank dating back to the Reformation revealed that the same handful of families have in fact been running the Western banking system for about 500 years.

    • Brian Niemeier

      We've got to get past this canard that embracing anything less than unrestricted free marketism means veering into Marxism. There are sound critiques of the overconcentration of enormous wealth that don't originate from Marx. Many originate from the Church.

    • Zaklog the Great

      I'm genuinely trying to work through these ideas here. I'm not just looking to be argumentative. It appears to me that it must be something other than just money that gets passed down. If wealth endures within a family, it's not just the money that is getting passed down. This seems obvious to me from the simple fact that we know that if you drop a lot of money on a poor person, it simply doesn't last.

      Now, that is not to say that there is not injustice of some kind going on. Social status and influence can be inherited as well, and those can build and/or preserve material wealth.

      Would you agree that the issue is not just the money?

    • Brian Niemeier

      Of course.

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