Raising children worthy of empires
Part II - 'The rich should leave their wealth to their children, not to charity'
My essay 'The rich should leave their wealth to their children, not to charity' gained hundreds of thousands of views and an overwhelmingly positive reception, for which I am grateful.
The central contention of the essay was that the root cause of the twisted practice of giving away one’s children’s inheritance is a failure of parenting: the failure to raise children worthy of stewarding great wealth.
It is natural, then, that I have received many requests for a follow-up piece which answers the question ‘How does one raise aristocratic children worthy of stewarding great wealth?’. Here I will attempt to do this - both to answer the call and for my own sake, as a father of young children.
I am somewhat qualified to offer advice on this front; not because I come from a family of great wealth (I do not), but because I come from a family with a history of service to one of the great European aristocratic families. My own family, though not aristocratic, has been granted modest heraldry. I grew up with and remain friends with people from wealthy families, both aristocratic and non-aristocratic.
As the eldest son of the eldest son stretching back to when records began, I will one day inherit stewardship of my family. I am currently in possession of much of the material which corresponds to this role. Below is my family crest, together with a matching shield that my wife painted for my young son to play with. I can post some other items in the Becoming Noble Chat if people are interested.
(I have redacted the family motto as this would make it a little too easy to look all of us up. No doubt one of my heraldry sperg readers can identify us anyway - if you wish to show off please directly message me rather than posting in the comments!)
I have informally questioned a few relevant friends on this subject of discussion, to supplement my own thoughts. I have not asked them to go ‘on the record’.
After my original post, Will Tanner, Editor of The American Tribune, sent me a provocative 2022 study which serves as a strong foundation for the arguments that will follow. This is ‘Trajectories of Aristocratic Wealth, 1858–2018: Evidence from Probate’ by Matthew Bond and Julien Morton.
The extensive evidence examined in the piece dismantles two falsehoods which those who attempted to criticize my original essay relied upon:
Inheriting great wealth necessarily corrupts children;
This corruption results in inherited wealth being largely squandered within a few generations.
In short, the study examines legal information about the inheritance of thousands of hereditary peers (members of British aristocratic families) over many generations.
Two of the authors’ findings are particularly relevant:
Aristocratic families gain wealth at a faster rate than the rest of the population, even when exposed to new pressures such as the industrial revolution and the rise of modern capitalism. The only things that slow them down are periods of exceptional inheritance taxation and wars in which aristocrats disproportionately die.
This faster rate of wealth expansion cannot be dismissed as ‘wealth creating wealth’. There is something special about the oldest families, which show the most stability of wealth growth. These families have outlasted and outperformed the ‘new money’ peerages granted to the families of tremendously wealthy individuals in the interwar period, many of which have faded into obscurity. Now, it is the oldest families which are again leaving the largest average grants.
To sum up this curious state of affairs, non-landed new wealthy peers burst on the scene from 1885, but their preeminence disappeared by 2018, while the pre-1885 older peers, like the tortoise to the hare, are now among the wealthiest hereditary peers.
— Matthew Bond & Julien Morton, Trajectories of Aristocratic Wealth
What is it about these families that is special? What are their practices which set them apart and grant them such resilience, generation after generation?
I will outline some childrearing practices which I have heard variations of again and again from those who live and breathe this way of life:
Never forget the normal practices of raising healthy children;
Ensure your family has a strong faith;
Impress upon your children your family’s identity, mission, responsibilities (and, at times, adversaries);
Initiate them into a structure that extends beyond the atomic family;
Expose them to a cast of superior men;
Ensure their inheritance comes in a form designed to last.
I. NEVER FORGET THE NORMAL PRACTICES OF RAISING HEALTHY CHILDREN
…as a cousin to many modern royals, I personally have had the additional advantage of knowing and understanding the goals and aspirations of some of the princes and princesses who became rulers.
What did I find? I met people who, since their earliest childhood, were raised to serve — to serve their country with every appearance, every gesture, every parade, every photo. Just as their parents and grandparents had done before. Since they were young, they got to know their countries, the political parties and politicians, and the Church representatives.
They learned about all the fault lines that menaced their country. They watched as their parents dealt with many problems. And they were told how their grandparents had confronted similar problems. Serving always meant putting your own interests second…
Furthermore, you knew that any mess you created when you were eventually in the position of power would burden your children when they came to power.
— Eduard Habsburg-Lothringen (Archduke Eduard of Austria), The Habsburg Way: Seven Rules for Turbulent Times
Great wealth is a blessing and a curse. Raising upper class children is a high-risk, high-reward, high-demand game.
The background threat of the spiritual corruption that can be induced by wealth means that raising exceptionally privileged children is unlike raising unprivileged children. It is an involved process and must be intentional. In one’s attempt to raise aristocrats, one is creating something exceptional in exceptional circumstances.
That being said, a degree of trust must be placed in your children: the trust that if you give them a fundamentally healthy upbringing (with truth, beauty, play, athletics, and adventures) they will be set on a virtuous path.
After all, before anything else, they are blessed by your blood and by your presence. Let them grow into a fundamentally healthy young person. Be present, eat with them, play with them, listen to them.
The lack of these fundamentals is a pitfall into which many of the newly rich fall. They convince themselves that they are doing their children a favor by devoting an excessive amount of time to work in order to provide their children with an excessive amount of wealth. Not so.
After all, it is around a dinner table with many siblings that children absorb the virtues… Children learn to put their own interests aside and give room to others; they learn from their elders. Most of all, children who see their parents together, and witness the love and respect that they have for each other, are given strength and security and told implicitly that it is worthwhile to grow up and engage in society. You know your parents (and your siblings) will always have your back.
— Eduard Habsburg-Lothringen (Archduke Eduard of Austria), The Habsburg Way: Seven Rules for Turbulent Times
Allow them to appreciate the world that they have been born into and to see its value. Teach them to appreciate the opportunities which wealth has given them in their most sophisticated forms: dances, dinner parties, beautiful excursions, and so forth. (But have zero tolerance for the crass version of this: crude displays of wealth, blowing money on low-class experiences and women, etc.)
The wealthy lead lives of exceptional temptation, given the ease with which they can indulge lust, gluttony, and sloth. Activities must therefore be prioritized which teach discipline. Physical challenges have an essential role to play here, and have since the nobility’s inception.
Consider the metaphysical framework into which jousts and other medieval aristocratic combat tournaments were integrated, which emphasized the cultivation of the virtue of ‘hardiness’:
Hardiness is not a quality that struggles for a definition. To be physically tough and undaunted is what the word now evokes in English, and it meant the same to the Francophone author of the Song of Roland…
Geoffrey de Charny also emphasised the masculine admirability of hardiness, but interpreted it more broadly in the light of the religious feeling of contemptus mundi… They should endure cold and heat with equal indifference; they should care little for the fear of death; they should strive hard and ignore discomfort and wounds… For him, the body is of little consequence in the face of the honour that a undaunted spirit can earn.
— David Crouch, The Birth of Nobility: Constructing Aristocracy in England and France 900-1300
The first and central virtue to be gained through the authentic pursuit of sport is the discipline to joyfully embrace hardship and pain. There is no noble spiritual system that does not require this characteristic. This mastery of self fundamentally underpins the pursuit of all higher goals.
Consider the more recent aristocratic practice of Mensur - ritualized sword dueling at elite universities:
In relatively recent times, various possibilities were offered by certain student corporations in Central Europe, the so-called Korpsstudenten practising Mensur - cruel but non-fatal duels that followed specific rules (leaving facial scars as traces) - with the goal of developing courage, steadfastness, intrepidity, and endurance to physical pain, while at the same time upholding the values of a higher ethics, of honour and camaraderie…
— Julius Evola, A Handbook for Right-Wing Youth
The point here is that a familiarity with real risk is necessary. The aristocracy have always engaged in dangerous games. This familiarity with death - memento mori - reminds us of the shortness of life, the greatness of the stakes, and the close proximity of the next life. ‘Death smiles at us all; all a man can do is smile back.’
The inner victory against the deepest forces that surface in one’s consciousness during times of tension and mortal danger is a triumph in an external sense, but it is also the sign of a victory of the spirit against itself and of an inner transfiguration.
— Julius Evola, Meditations on the Peaks
Evola describes, of course, the practice taken to the extreme. But sports, danger, and discomfort should be an integrated part of the children’s upbringing: climbing, riding, hunting, swimming, perhaps rugby or polo if available, and so forth.
II. FAITH
The crowd is only struck by heroism when it is bright and loud. What impresses the public is brilliance, and not the painful and slow ascent of souls who rise in silence and shadow to greatness.
— Léon Degrelle, The Burning Souls
Wealthy children must not feel that they are untouchable.
It is necessary to impose on children that they are not, in fact, at the summit of all inequalities, with no one higher than them. They must not be left without a goal which would require great effort to achieve, or left with nothing that they could fail to secure.
They must know that there are goods which their wealth cannot purchase for them, and punishments that their wealth cannot save them from. Their belief must be authentic and intense, and reinforced from an early age.
The only King of France to become a saint - Louis IX - was told by his mother Blanche of Castile that she would rather he lay dead at her feet than that he commit a single mortal sin.
For those children who have the financial ‘freedom’ to do anything, true freedom comes from the strength to say ‘no’ to the endless temptations which will beset them. This requires discipline, faith, and virtue.
Obedience is the highest form of the use of freedom.
It is a constant manifestation of authority, authority over oneself, the most difficult of all.
No one is really capable of commanding others who is not first able to command himself, to tame in him the proud wanderer who would have liked to throw himself madly into the winds of adventure.
— Léon Degrelle, The Burning Souls
These children might be kings, but they must never forget that there is a King of Kings. Aristocratic children are not untouchable; and indeed, they have unequalled responsibilities. They are called upon to be the spiritual pillars of their communities.
Thus, real monarchs were the steadfast personification of the life "beyond ordinary life." Beneficial spiritual influences used to radiate upon the world of mortal beings from the mere presence of such men… These influences permeated people's thoughts, intentions, and actions, ordering every aspect of their lives and constituting a fit foundation for luminous, spiritual realizations.
— Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World
For more on the applied centrality of faith, I would recommend Archduke Eduard of Austria’s book The Habsburg Way - he devotes a great portion of the work to the importance of the Church in sustaining his family for a millennia.
III. IDENTITY, MISSION, STAKES, & ADVERSARIES
It is not wealth as such that is spiritually poisonous, but the sense of pointlessness that can arise in a life in which man desires only what he can easily buy. This gives rise to nihilism, hedonism, and destruction.
Countering this aimlessness requires the cultivation of aspirations and responsibilities so great that money cannot buy them. This is a multigenerational and metaphysical project which the greatest houses undertake.
It is ultimately a manifestation of the quest for the virtue of magnanimity.
Magnanimity by its very name denotes stretching forth of the mind to great things… a man is said to be magnanimous chiefly because he is minded to do some great act.
— St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, Secunda Secundæ, Q. 129: Magnanimity
Children must be conditioned to stretch forth their minds to do great things, to order the world around them according to justice and charity, to take up their mantle as the spiritual and physical guardians of their people. The truly magnanimous man “does not busy himself with all kinds of works, but only with great works, such as are becoming to him.” Framed correctly, this is a deeply inspiring and exciting project. Children will respond to it.
A necessary component of this is imparting to children that this is what the great men of our family do and have always done. They must be given heroes, and the fact that they are the scions of these heroes inculcates in the young a feeling of responsibility in continuing their legacy, and a sense of belief in the children that they have what it takes to do it.
At some point, a young Habsburg begins to read books that mention the family history, and suddenly a portrait in an uncle’s apartment gets a backstory. Then — if you are a young Habsburg — you discover that there are portraits of your ancestors in nearly every famous museum of the world. If you look carefully, you might see the Order of the Golden Fleece dangling around their necks. As you get older, you may be invited to centenary memorial celebrations, in front of a statue of some emperor perhaps, where Schützen guards in traditional costumes and with historic weapons salute the family and fire salvos to celebrate the remembrance. It is hard not to be in awe of your own family’s past — particularly when you also meet ardent monarchists for whom the Habsburg family is a hope for the future, not simply a reminder of the past.
— Eduard Habsburg-Lothringen (Archduke Eduard of Austria), The Habsburg Way: Seven Rules for Turbulent Times
The necessary reflection of aspirational lessons are the prohibitions: “These are the things our family do not do.”
IV. INITIATE THEM INTO A STRUCTURE BEYOND THE ATOMIC FAMILY
Good brother, you ask a very great thing, for of our Order you see only the outer appearance. For the appearance is that you see us having fine horses, and good equipment, and good food and drink, and fine robes, and thus it seems to you that you should be well at ease. But you do not know the harsh commandments which lie beneath; for it is a painful thing for you, who are your own master, to make yourself a serf to others.
— From the Templar initiation process, quoted in Malcolm Barber’s The New Knighthood: a history of the Order of the Temple
As part of the aspirational framework described in the previous section, it is a powerful supplement to have a continuous initiatory structure into which the young may aspire to rise, from their youth to deep into their adulthood.
These can be private clubs, orders, or fraternities - each with their own codes of conduct and requirements for entry.
To gain the right to be admitted among adults, the adolescent has to pass through a series of initiatory ordeals: it is by virtue of these rites, and of the revelations that they entail, that he will be recognized as a responsible member of the society. Initiation introduces the candidate into the human community and into the world of spiritual and cultural values. He learns not only the behavior patterns, the techniques, and the institutions of adults but also the sacred myths and traditions of the tribe, the names of the gods and the history of their works…
— Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth
A relevant example is given by the Catholic chivalric Order of the Golden Fleece - ‘the most prestigious order in the world’. Induction into this order is exceptionally rare (and expensive, with the collars given to initiates made of $50,000 worth of gold). Current knights of the Spanish order include King Felipe VI of Spain and Emperor Emeritus Akihito of Japan.
There is a separate Austrian order, to which many of the prominent Habsburgs continue to be initiated.
If you wish to undertake such a practice but require a simpler starting point, there is an informal equivalent which has been common conduct to the great European families over the centuries.
Many monarchs have sent their children to spend a period of their childhood in the courts of other aristocratic figures, to learn from them at what they were best at (often martial skills) and to develop relationships that would be important for the family later in life. This exposure to a broader cast of competent and virtuous men further reenforces the class to which the young should aspire.
Examples abound, but an amusing one is the case of Henry II of England, who had his eldest son educated in the courts of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, and William Marshall, 1st Earl of Pembroke - a knight of great renown. Henry’s son then used these skills to turn around and make war on his father at age 18. Not ideal, perhaps, but one cannot accuse the child of indolence!
V. THE FORM OF CAPITAL
One of the findings of the ‘Trajectories of Aristocratic Wealth’ cited above is that the landed families - those which had significant and historic physical estates - were the most durable across generations.
A children’s inheritance should be as illiquid as possible, and should be laden with values other than mere financial worth: history, place, personal experience.
While the children are alive, rather than showering them in cash before they are ready to wield it properly, wealth should be transferred by reinforcing healthy behaviors: paying for a quality education, giving them access to family-owned apartments or small houses (but large enough to start a family), paying for weddings, medical expenses, and childcare, paying for visits and holidays with other family members, introducing them to significant individuals who might provide opportunities for them.
Rather than forcing them to go into the job market and work an irrelevant job for mediocre pay (and generating value for people outside the family), give them an increasing role in the family estate, managing ever more significant parts of the family enterprises and assets.
They should only be able to upgrade responsibilities and assets once they have proven themselves at a certain level. This process should start young - they should be given chores to learn to work, and the stewardship of assets of increasing value. An example would be watches: as a child, they might be given a toy watch, then - if they successfully look after that for a year - a tough watch, then a quartz watch, a mechanical watch, a luxury watch, and eventually an heirloom watch.
Their ultimate inheritance - your full estate - will normally be given to them when they are already deep into their adulthood. Ideally by this point they will be virtuous and worthy to take up the mantle, but to reinforce this ensure that your estate is as illiquid as possible. There should be a ‘family house’ that they are not to sell. Start financially planning as soon as possible to ensure that you are protected against inheritance taxes that would prevent this.
Do all of this - and you will have children to be proud of; children worthy of inheriting empires.
Thank you for reading.
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Sic transit imperium,
Johann
Very provocative. Though not well off, my father was a local postmaster and occasional preacher in our small community. There was a sense that the family name meant something and was to be honored. There was also a sense that you earned your own way in life. Raising my own family in the anonymity of suburbia meant I and they were unknown, there was no family name to uphold. Our focus was on building character and instilling Christian values. Without the "community" to reinforce the sense of heritage, it was no small challenge.
On a related topic, in the past it was the practice of family or other wealthy individuals to act as patrons to those gifted and seeking placement in the arts or ministry. This was considered as important to society to ruling and was honored. There remains a place for that in our times.
Every society will have aristocrats; will the aristocracy be built on virtue or money?
I appreciate your writing.
Nobility - the art and practice of popping the kid out of the mother right at the foot of the stairs of ever-increasing responsibility.