Succession isn’t “stealth wealth,” it’s the future of our blood lines.

Speaking of the next generation… the forum continueth to giveth:

Jiran: Dude speaking of [company buyouts / takeovers] I have been down such a hole of Arnault of LVMH. This man is a legend and I never knew.ⁱ

Pete: Oh ya absolute king shit. Building a legit fucking dynasty too with all his sons leading various divisions, fighting to be the next CEO. Now that’s how you do “succession.” Not some dumb American drama about overpriced unbranded clothes.ⁱⁱ

Jiran: Dude absolute savage he put two more of his kids on board. Now that’s how you protect your family legacy.

So it is that an “IPO” or a “corporate buyout” is in no way, shape, or form a replacement for proper succession planning, which is to say organisational survival not just in name but in spirit.

Which is why, for Mr. Arnault just as much as for yours truly, “bring your son to work day” (seen at right) isn’t just another misshapen government-led initiative encouraging kids to “find their passion” or whatever other étatist garbage. On the contrary, it’s sine qua non for inter-generational persistence of business, craft, expertise, and yes, spirit. Can it be any wonder that in pre-20th century Europe, ie. the last time that families and religion mattered in the West, that “[Surnom] et fils” used to be painted on so many business doors?ⁱⁱⁱ

But how our temporally accelerationist times have changed us! The post-FDR deracinating and sterilising cultists (DSCs) now “running the show” do their damnedest to persuade us that “money is the most important thing in the world” so we should always sell our company shares (ie. our babies) to VCs and hedge funds and public markets, if not also that “having kids emits too much carbon” or that “IVF treatments are NBD so just focus on your careers and your happiness,” with the net result being that far too many of us are then oh-so-conveniently left with zero fucking choice down the road but to adopt some third-worlder and pretend like genetics aren’t the single most important factor determining child outcomes (not just by a little bit either), and then of course watch helplessly as The Borg absorbs the mature businesses we’ve dedicated our working lives to creating, at best leaving us with juuuuust enough money to “retire” but no meaningful impact or legacy beyond that. Who could’ve predicted!

But what if there was another way? What if families came before careers? And what if boys regularly frequented their dad’s factories, shops, and places of business? What if our children started to understand from an early age that the material world doesn’t just fall out of the sky and show up on their doorsteps in a brown box within 24 hours of hitting “add to cart”? What if they helped sweep the floors at the end of the day? Or sat in on engineering, strategy, and budgeting meetings just listening to the kinds of conversations that propel the world forward? What if they could sponge-up the implicit understandings that no one will ever write into a university textbook and unconsciously absorb lifetimes of accrued wisdom, carried from one mound-builder to the next and the next since as long as we can trace back our lineage?^iv What if “succession” wasn’t just about consuming this or that thing, but about about creating and crafting the future on inter-generational timescales?^v

Of course DSCs (via the 500) call this kind of familial integration “child labour”^vi or this kind of tight-knittedness “nepotism”, if only because they demonstrably don’t want decentralised dynasties to threaten their centralised locus of power. And so they discourage spiritual continuity and inter-generational creativity for us, leaving it only for themselves,^vii and they set the stage for Procrustean fungibility of all people and all parts to keep lubricating their sadistic socialist gears, pushing for “standarisation” and “economies of scale” to flourish at the expense of handcraft and human meaning, thus papering over the heights of human creativity and ambition with a mechanised mediocrity that’s “more just.”^viii Ultimately, they want to pretend that our blood is the same as all other blood, that we’re all “one big happy family” and that feeding starving Africans is just as valuable as feeding the hungry people in our own communities, even in our own nuclear families… because utilitarianism is obviously true omigerd!

But we won’t buy it. Because our blood is more than other blood. Because our spirit is more than other spirits. Just as “Tikkun” is more than mend.^ix

That’s the alpha in our lives.^x That’s succession. Just ask Arnault.^xi

1. Bernard Arnault is not only a commercial shark but a hell of an art collector too, in the mystical sense of the term! So I’m very much looking forward to checking out the new Rothko exhibit at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in a few weeks. It’s been 5 years since I last spent any considerable time with Markus‘ magical works. ↩
2. The reference here being to another HBO show I couldn’t be bothered to watch but was seemingly “all the rage” not least of all because the characters dressed in boring ass beiges and blacks somehow rebranded as “stealth wealth” Anyways here’s the trailer:
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3. And that it still exists in praxis in the WASPiest bastion in North America, viz. Boston? ↩
4. You might not think it, but memory is the future, per Zohar:
   

   Jacob makes Joseph swear that he will fulfill his father’s dying wish by placing his hand on his thigh. This gesture recalls the oath that Abraham makes his servant, Eliezer, take—that he will find a wife for Isaac. What’s the significance of the parallel? Both Abraham and Jacob find themselves in a state of vulnerability, where their succession is anything but guaranteed, but where they no longer have the power to ensure it on their own. Both Abraham and Jacob find themselves in moments of transition where, by definition, the meaning of their lives is no longer up to them, but the next generation. Strikingly, though, the burial of Jacob in Canaan is likened by the literary parallel to the quest to find Isaac a wife. One seems future oriented (marriage, reproduction); the other seems past oriented (memory, legacy). But both are past and future oriented. Without Isaac and Rebecca there can be no memory. Without Joseph’s memory and the memory of Jacob’s descendants there can be no future. Surprisingly, memory is always future oriented. It is an act of belief in some kind of continuity, some kind of responsibility to be handed down.

   Thus too is history humanity!

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5. Have you ever noticed that pretty much every inter-generational project, whether it’s the Sagrada Familia or the Cologne Cathedral, is a religious project? Now why do you suppose that is? Maybe it’s because we can only create the future together if we believe in a future (and a present) that’s greater than ourselves? And that tiny-minded secularism qua religion fails so spectacularly because it basically only believes in Spiderman and Spongebob?

   

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6. Even though, of course, the decrepit and demonic socialist state would never call its “education” system “babysitting,” in spite of the fact that essentially none of the kids being “educated” come out the other side of 20 years of life wasted with the actually necessary skills to succeed in the critical industries that will determine the 21st century balance of geopolitical power and thus our respective prosperities, viz. Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Manufacturing.

   See also: Sam Sarris’ article for Palladium Magazine: School Is Not Enough. ↩

7. Not just in Florence either! ↩
8. 10 families in your home is “more just,” comrade. It’s even true in New York today!
   And to the extent that at least a few of us have the strength of will to resist, they’re only too happy to import all the savages they need to achieve their underhanded ambitions by dint of sheer volume, no matter that a cell with entirely porous bilipid membrane will never be called a “cell” for much longer. ↩
9. Per Zohar on the PloughCast podcast, “tikkun olam” isn’t social justice herpaderp, it’s establish, institute, restore; correct, perfect, prepare; arrange, array, adorn. Rooted in tradition, forevermore. Hineni. ↩
10. Per Zohar again:
    

    In the quest for covenantal transmission, Abraham is concerned with biological reproduction: will my children have children? But Jacob is concerned with cultural reproduction: will my children remember Israel?

    We must choose the covenant. No matter your talents and achievements, unless there is delta in your character and in your trajectory there is no “alpha” in your life.

    Thus, the covenant is a covenant not just to transmit observance or worldview, but to transmit the value of Lech l’cha, which must be repeated in every generation. It is when we depart from our place of origin, our given place, that we find we are most connected to our lineage and our tradition. We become bridges between hesed (choice) and emmet (thrownness).

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11. Or the Sterns. ↩