Leaving a Legacy: Inheritance, Charity, & Thousand-Year Families

by Johann Kurtz

Should you leave your wealth to your children or to charity?

The greatest wealth transfer in history looms, with trillions from the post-war generation set to change hands. How it unfolds will shape civilization’s future.

After lifetimes of work, creation, and sacrifice, millions of men and women confront the ultimate question of What will theirs be?

Who will remember their names? Who will honor their memories after they are gone? How can they ensure their children and grandchildren thrive—happy, healthy, and successful—in a world that is rapidly changing?

Should they leave their wealth to their children, or would this spoil and corrupt them? Should they give everything to charities? How can they defend nepotism in a meritocratic age?

These are the questions that grip family leaders.

Leaving a Legacy delivers answers by reconnecting readers with the timeless philosophy, theology, and practice of inheritance that built the Western world.

It defines the crucial charity versus philanthropy, nepotism versus family duty. It weaves cautionary and inspirational tales of great figures and dynasties, grounded in the Christian tradition. It traces the history of how we arrived at this crisis of confusion.

Above all, Leaving a Legacy reveals that true charity is a multi-generational project—and that virtuous family dynasties are its indispensable guardians. It equips leaders to embrace this sacred duty and forge a legacy they will be forever proud of.

168 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 14, 2025

Reviews

[joan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m not the target audience for this book, having no plans underway to commission a sculpture of an ancestor nor to mentor artisanal businesses on my estate. (there’s my Gen X irony showing.. I do have ancestors who, though not noble, deserve a nod.) The author is such a young fellow, living in such a hostile environment, that it’s hard to think he has such plans either, but he is clearly planning to live as if such plans are possible, which is a necessary condition for them.

I can see the peril.

A noble legacy has to have its beginnings, and be able to scale, to work in microcosm—there are ideas for this in here. Perhaps the author might have brought his book’s theme down to earth a little more.. for few exiled princes achieve their restoration.

[Shellie G · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s good. I wished for more examples. I think the suggestions to getting your kids involved were great but some would be really hard to implement. It would be a mom’s part-time job if one took all examples. Wished I had read earlier in my trajectory as a parent. I now have young grandkids, which I hope to commit to implementing some of these suggestions. I’ll am encouraged to look further online at other resources from the author.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Great Commission of the modern age is not to bring the Gospel to all nations. It is to CONSOOM! Thus, a man’s perceived success in life is determined mostly by how many resources he can burn through before death, maximizing his hedonic inputs. Leaving a Legacy is a sweeping rejection of this pernicious philosophy, combined with an offering of detailed alternatives—“a classic, Western, Christian vision of family-centric charity.” Instead of single-generation consumption, Johann Kurtz preaches that each of us should strive to leave a legacy—that is, to materially influence the lives of future generations, both of his family and of society.

On the surface, this book seems directed at men who are already established and have substantial discretionary assets. It’s really more broadly applicable, however. Even if you have no money, you will still benefit from this book. After all, maybe someday you will have money, and if you never acquire money or other property, the attitudes you inculcate in your children and collateral descendants are themselves a legacy, one which may more directly implicate the allocation of wealth in a future generation.

Kurtz analyzes his topic primarily through a Christian lens, though not exclusively a Christian lens—the Funeral Oration of Pericles (not at his own funeral—at the public memorial for soldiers who died in the Peloponnesian War) makes more than one appearance, as do many lessons from the Old Testament. It is evident, and Kurtz would be the first to say, that much of what he says is not really new; it would have been a commonplace in ancient Israel or classical Greece. But most of it has been forgotten, or worse, denigrated and rejected as inapplicable to the modern world. He aims to recover the wisdom of the past so that it may be applied to the future.

We begin with what charity is, for “To understand how to leave a great legacy, we must fundamentally understand charity; only then will we have a clear idea of how to pass on our wealth to do good.” The most famous instruction on charity is, certainly, Christ’s Parable of the Good Samaritan. There, given the Law that we are to love our neighbor, He answered the question put to Him, “who is my neighbor”? Scripture makes clear that our neighbor is not only those people who are within our ethnoreligious community, as the Jews believed (and they and Muslims still believe–only giving to other Muslims satisfies the Muslim obligation of zakat, and mainstream interpretations of Islam actually forbid giving any charity to non-Muslims), but others outside that community as well. Not every “person” everywhere in the world, however. Rather, “neighbor,” plesios in the Greek of the New Testament, embeds the sense of someone located spatially close to you. This, combined with the universal Christian view of charity as love for God extended to others, and that we can only actually love those we can meet and know, means that “love and community are inextricably linked, that a mutual knowing is a necessary component of the virtue.” We may extend our community to those currently outside the community, naturally, as did the Samaritan, but he created a personal relationship with the man he helped.

I think this analysis is correct. On the surface, it is in some friction with the apparent message of some of the Fathers of the Church, notably Saint Basil and Saint John Chrysostom, who fiercely directed that all wealth should be distributed to the poor. In some passages, both of those Fathers seem to advocate a sort of leveling, although this was not the dominant view of the early Church (and is traditionally viewed as a “counsel of perfection,” not required for salvation). I have previously extensively analyzed Basil’s and Chrysostom’s demands as they relate to the modern world, and I will not repeat those thoughts here, but in short, the Fathers could not have conceived of any charity other than the type Kurtz recommends. They lived in a world where riches resulted almost exclusively from zero-sum interactions, and the primary activity of wealth was consumption, something Kurtz also condemns. I doubt if either man would have, or rather has, since they are members of the cloud of witnesses, any objection to anything Kurtz has to say.

In any case, in this frame, “we can see why we should be skeptical of the notion that leaving assets in our will to impersonal organizations, to be executed by others upon our death for the theoretical benefit of those who we do not know, should qualify as true charity.” No pre-modern would have thought so, but we have been propagandized by the twentieth-century concept of philanthropy, an attempt to make scientific the giving of charity with the aim of solving problems, many with a political overlay. Rich men were convinced they should be motivated by, in the words of Orestes Brownson, “the love of all men in general, and of no one in particular,” the very opposite of the correct understanding of charity.

This is not an abstract problem; it became universal in America in the twentieth century. Kurtz narrates the pitiful history of the Ford Foundation, founded by Henry Ford and his son Edsel explicitly to benefit the people of Michigan. Henry Ford II unwisely allowed the Foundation to come under the control of others, because he was told he needed to “democratize” its governance. He was very soon betrayed, even in the 1950s, by Judas-like trustees who changed the beneficiaries of the Foundation to the world, not the people of Michigan. Kurtz quotes Heather MacDonald, “When the Ford Foundation flowered into an activist, ‘socially conscious’ philanthropy in the 1960s, it sparked the key revolution in the foundation worldview: the idea that foundations were to improve the lot of mankind not by building lasting institutions but by challenging existing ones.” Thus today the Ford Foundation is one of the most destructive forces on the planet, giving hundreds of millions of dollars annually to extreme left-wing causes, such as actively supporting the Floyd Riots. Essentially all the money the Ford Foundation spends is of negative social utility. When I come to power, hopefully soon, one of my first acts will be to seize all the assets of the Ford Foundation and imprison for many years scores, if not hundreds, of people associated with it, at least if they don’t flee into exile first.

It is not just the Ford Foundation which wastes money, of course; most of the money distributed as false charity to people far away, especially in the Third World, is wasted. Many trillions have been given to the Third World for seventy years, almost all of it wasted or actually counterproductive. (And let’s not even get into “voluntourism.”) Yet the number of people living in extreme poverty in Africa has doubled since 1990 (even if the percentage has dropped somewhat). Giving aid to those far away with whom you have zero connection is both not commanded by Christ and frequently equivalent to burning money, not a good combination.

Kurtz’s does not claim that all giving to places like Africa is wholly wasted, though my opinion is that more that ninety percent of the time, it is (and that as long as your own are struggling, it is morally wrong to give others any money). Rather, he argues that, aside from it being pseudo-charity, giving money to places like Africa rarely is done in a way that allows the giver to tell the difference between wasted and not. If it does not go into a warlord’s Swiss bank account, or to fund shiftless NGO employees (Kurtz notes that twenty percent of the private workforce of New York City is employed by non-profits), it is just as likely to erode local initiative, or to be used to build something that the locals do not understand or care about and which will be dismantled to sell for scrap as soon as the white people depart (the usual fate of development projects, large and small, in the Third World). The disconnection of charity from the necessary local element is the problem, both practically and morally.

That is, “you cannot outsource your charity,” in the definition Kurtz assigns, “nor should you want to. Too many of us are unwilling to risk discomfort by deeply embedding ourselves in the lives of the poor we claim to serve.” We are unwilling to show our love, uncomfortable doing so, except by impersonally donating money through intermediaries, which is not showing love at all. “Our own civilization’s problems like cratering family formation, collapsing social fabric, environmental degradation, and deaths of despair can be ignored when we convince ourselves that we are personally achieving the noble goal of saving millions of lives abroad.”

And back to the main point of the book, in any case, even if you choose to give money in this fashion, it is not leaving a legacy. This can only be done through your family, and Kurtz directs all the remaining chapters of his book towards demonstrating this truth.

Many prominent wealthy people boast that they will leave nothing at all to their children, rather spend it all on pleasures for themselves. Kurtz identifies this as a fundamental abnegation of duty, because “riches are fundamentally God-given and come with duties.” Less hedonism, more duty. He cites Saint Basil, “Why are you rich while another is poor, unless it be that you may have the merits of a good stewardship, and he the reward of patience?” The key to duty is stewardship. What duties a man has varies with his station; Kurtz profiles the execrable Edward VIII, who abandoned his throne to satisfy his forbidden lust, which “communicated to his citizens that their ancient order and morality and faith were dispensable should the temptations be sufficient.” But wealthy men who are not kings also have binding duties, summarized as “elevating those around him through the projection of beauty, taste, manners, and sacrifice.”

Disinheriting one’s children, even if not done for solipsistic, hedonistic reasons, but rather in order to supposedly encourage industry in them, is not the answer either. “One cannot outsource parenting and the cultivation of virtue to the job market. What these parents are doing, whether they realize it or not, is resetting their children to an average position because this is easier than discovering how to make proper use of an exceptional one.” One of the duties which wealth imposes is to use a man’s wealth to raise his children to a higher level, and to instruct them how to use that higher level, that membership in the ruling class, to fulfil the duties they inherit along with wealth.

The usual curt dismissal of this approach is that is not “meritocratic,” meant as a self-explanatory linguistic kill shot. Kurtz, quite correctly, heaps contempt on meritocracy, a term coined as a pejorative in 1956, and far from the central American principle it is often portrayed. A meritocracy is by definition a system in which each person receives what he deserves, but this is meaningless without a common definition of what each person deserves. It is “like saying ‘my political philosophy is good politics.’ ”

When Americans today refer to meritocracy, they mean that each person deserves rewards if he scores highly on “mass standardized formal examinations and evaluations of performance,” seen as leading to economic productivity enabling more consumption. Broader criteria, universally used throughout human history, including whether someone is close to you, by blood, faith, or class, or someone towards whom you have a personal duty, are rejected as irrelevant. But this is a value judgment, and moreover, one which is both stupid and wrong. Nepotism, for example, is affirmatively good; it is only its abuse (in connection with which the term first came into use) that is bad. Aggressive preference for family members is excellent and outstanding, and should be praised—and also demonstrably leads to far better outcomes for family enterprises and for society. It was deliberate preference for one’s own, not false test-based meritocracy, which made both America and the West.

The modern view of meritocracy is, by contrast, intensely societally destructive. It leads to the view that what in the past were regarded as the less fortunate members of society needing uplift instead deserve their low status, and it additionally atomizes each successful man, who sees himself as standing wholly apart from his forefathers and his descendants. (We can leave aside, and Kurtz does, that America is not even meritocratic in the theoretical modern sense, but rather wholly organized around taking from white men and giving what they produce to women and non-whites, compelled by all-encompassing anti-male and anti-white laws enforced by spending billions of dollars of white men’s money.) You should, therefore, “not raise children without merit, but . . . the merit which you pursue should be holistically understood to include your descendants’ health, faith, beauty, fecundity, vitality, vision, curiosity, and virtue.” Disinheriting your children makes this impossible, because wealth allows you to create the structures encouraging this. Otherwise, all you can offer is advice, likely ignored by justly resentful offspring.

The goal should not be only to perpetuate a wealthy family, that is, merely to perpetuate inequality, although of course inequality is the natural state of man and society. It should be to perpetuate a virtuous family, and in this context, most of all this means that “you must justify your wealth with righteous action.” Otherwise, you have only formed a plutocracy, which while perhaps superficially good for your family, is not good for your society, and not ultimately good for your family. The key is becoming part of a virtuous ruling class, which means “submitting to a culture of external obligations” that extend across the generations. The great families which can grow out of this, who rule, make a society what it is. To be sure, the ruling class cannot let itself become sclerotic by forbidding all new entrants; this is the purpose of requiring new entrants to enter slowly, with only later generations becoming fully accepted.

It is not, in fact, true that families rise and decay “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” Quite the contrary; studies show that aristocratic families often last hundreds of years. (I think Kurtz overlooks that in America, rather than England, from where he offers most examples, this is less true. And yes, the Habsburgs and other less-famed European families have done it, but that was an even more different society.) They accomplish this by the manner in which they raise their children—family rituals; faith; impressing upon children the “family’s identity, mission, and values”; and “initiating children into structures beyond the [nuclear] family.” Rituals include simple matters such as the every-day family dinner, and many more complex, which “assert ‘this is who we are.’ ” They bind the family and they also indoctrinate into culture and taste, something only really fully possible with experiences wealth can bring. Faith imbues the world with meaning and provides “a model of how the world should be.” The family’s identity, most of all the accomplishments of the family, inculcates responsibility and an aversion to bringing shame on the family. And children must interact with other families at both formal and informal social events of many kinds; this forms their proper and demonstrative manners, as well as brings them into contact with potential suitable spouses.

Kurtz chooses a towering figure from American history, John Hancock, to illustrate how this works in practice. His father died when he was very young, but he was literally raised by nepotism—his uncle took him in, gave him graduated but ultimately total responsibility in business, and left most of his estate to Hancock. He, in turn, used his wealth to benefit the people of Boston—not by giving it to organizations that decided how to spend it outside Boston, but by building businesses to employ men, erecting public buildings to benefit the citizens, and acting at every turn to build up something larger than himself. Hancock never hid, rather even flaunted, his wealth, instead of beclowning himself by pretending to be something he was not, while at the same time directly and personally interacting frequently with the poorest citizens, engaging in innumerable small acts of charity directed towards them, such as delivering firewood and food and rebuilding burned houses. He played an instrumental role (though non-military; he was no good at that) in the War of Independence, including reassuring French aristocrats suspicious of the more levelling type of American rebel. Without directed wealth, none of this would have been possible.

A key to Hancock’s success, and to all attempts to leave a legacy intergenerationally, is to avoid bequeathing or even holding large amounts of liquid wealth, the dubious goal of most wealthy people today. Best of all are family businesses, the more permanent-asset-based (such as real estate) the better, which contrary to myth outperform businesses run by strangers. Children should be eased into roles in the family businesses very early, as their talents permit, with an eye to their future leadership. “Remember that you are not attempting to make them the best worker amongst peers, you are forming them into a unique category which transcends other workers: a leader who prioritizes long-term over short-term, ensures that the business fundamentally serves family flourishing before narrower objectives, and harmonizes efforts across family assets.”

All that a wealthy man does should be done in a magnanimous way, in the sense . . . . [Review completes as first comment.]

[Graham Seibert · Rating 5 out of 5]

An author has to have a concept of his readership in writing a book. Kurtz’ topic is how to plan your estate such that your legacy endures for generations. This review includes several passages from the book, set off in purple or indented, depending on the medium.

The most obvious concern is money. According to the Federal Reserve to be in the top one percent of Americans you have to have $13 million. The top half of a percent is 20 million. The top 10th of 1% is 61 million. There are not enough people in these categories to support the book, besides which they already have people advising them how to handle their money.

Though he addresses big money, Kurtz’ core message of the book is that a legacy consists of more than just financial. Most modern Americans with these amounts of money do a miserable job of passing it along, and those of us with less still have a lot to pass along. Topping the list are our DNA, our bloodline, and our culture, our folklore, our connections and our values.

Though the it contains a number of thought-provoking notions, the book is short enough to comfortably read in an afternoon. The greatest insight is that person’s legacy is represented by the personal qualities of people in the succeeding generations, not merely by money. This review tracks the table of contents, presenting the major ideas in each chapter.
1. Giving is not charity
2. Legacy is destroyed by charity
3. Your money is not yours to spend
4. Disinheriting your children will not save them
5. Your dynastic duty
6. Raising children worthy of empires
7. Thousand-year estates
8. How they take power
9. Leaving a legacy

I write this review just after reading Nicole Shanahan, ex-wife of Google founder Sergey Brin, on the hopeless confusion of the wives of the very rich. She does not name names, but anybody passingly familiar with the news is aware of the misguided philanthropies of Mackinsie Bezos, Laurene Powell Jobs and other such women. I, your reviewer, took children of my millennial family to Arianna Huffington’s Washington mansion for play dates and have followed from afar her children turned out. Not well.

Giving is not charity

The key message of this chapter is that giving money is far different from helping people. Creating dependency can destroy their initiative and sense of self-worth and keep them from developing skills and habits necessary to improve themselves.

The new philanthropic elect were to be motivated, in the words of Orestes Brownson, by “the love of all men in general, and of no one in particular”.

Charity is not a system of governance but a personal disposition to the world—a totalizing way of being, which should consume our every moment. This is what it means to bring charity into its full majesty as a virtue: the development of a constant habit which perfects one’s soul through the projection of love.

Legacy is destroyed by charity

This chapter begins with the cautionary story of the Ford Foundation. Henry Ford’s charitable inclinations are outlined extensively in his 1920 My Life and Work. He employed many blind and lesser-abled people, but only in jobs they could perform. It was not charity – it was making optimal use of available skills.

His grandson, Henry Ford II, in the spirit of democracy, relinquished control of the Foundation. It now acts in a manner absolutely opposite of what Henry would have wanted. Giving money away is hard work!

“Philanthropaths” (my term, not Kurtz’) such as Bill Gates have given philanthropy a bad name. Instead of helping people help themselves, the givers attempt to change the world by imposing their own agendas, such as enforced sterility and geoengineering. They do so without knowing about, consulting or caring for the “beneficiaries” of their giving.

Kurtz’ observation is that wealth is a responsibility that cannot be offloaded to others. Instead…

Family is the proper vehicle by which your wealth should be carried into the future. Money is a mercurial force and cannot be sent off into the world, unmoored from family and community, and be expected to do good. It must be stewarded by a strong custodian—ideally prepared from birth—to trammel that wild force in virtuous directions.

Your money is not yours to spend

Inherited money is a responsibility, not to be given up lightly. Kurtz faults King Edward VIII for giving up his obligation to rule the British Empire impartially and have heirs to continue the same. He faults him again for wanting to marry his American lover, Wallis Simpson, in the 1930s without giving up his royal prerogatives.

Kurtz has an essay on the vacuity of hedonism. It is ultimately unsatisfying. There is never enough, and the pursuit of novelties is invariably destructive. The only true satisfaction comes in fulfilling one’s obligation to his God, his forebears, peers and descendants. Riches are ultimately God-given, and one has an obligation to Him. This was easier to appreciate in prior ages, in which the nobility readily acknowledged their privileged birth and assume the related responsibilities, rather than this one in which we assume that the talents that enabled us to max the SATs and graduate from Harvard en route to Wall Street came gratis, with no obligation to God or the parents that provided them.

Disinheriting your children will not save them

Many rich men such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffet even Shaquille O’Neal have decided to give their wealth to charity rather than leave it to their children. We already observe that charities such as the Ford, Rockefeller, Sackler and other foundations, not to mention those of the Clintons, Soros and Obamas, benefit the donors and tend to harm the supposed beneficiaries.

Great wealth is a responsibility, one best managed by people who feel a sense of noblesse oblige from birth onward. In a more local sense, a family farm that endures for generations is a blessing to its community. Kurtz faults “progressive” taxation schemes that have made multi-generational fortunes difficult to maintain.

Here is a core thesis of the book:

The West was built on multi-generational, divinely-inspired great works, which are impossible to continue if we perform a hard-reset every generation and consign our children to forevermore trawling LinkedIn while they are ruled over by nouveau riche tech and finance oligarchs. No: some are called to a higher mission. Some must build virtuous dynasties capable of relentlessly pursuing the greatest ends over many generations.

And a historical observation:

The United States of America was not a monarchy, but neither was it a meritocracy until quite recently (and even now, sectors remain which are dominated by particular families). It is therefore tenuous to claim that ‘meritocracy built the West’. No: meritocracy is an intensely modern project, and it has bought drawbacks alongside its advantages. Distilling the ineffable qualities of human existence into ‘objective data’ has proved challenging for the social sciences.

The richness of human reality naturally resists reduction down to a few measurable factors. Thus, paradoxically, in meritocracy, we necessarily find an impoverished understanding of merit. Where the ‘merit’ criterion is now applied to an adult, it usually means a single factor: ‘relative economic productivity’. The best person for the job is the person we expect to generate the most capital in the role, based on measurable factors which we anticipate are correlated with this productivity (educational attainment and so forth).

In summary

The point of this chapter, therefore, is not that you should raise children without merit, but that it is essential that the merit which you pursue should be holistically understood to include your descendants’ health, faith, beauty, fecundity, vitality, vision, curiosity, and virtue.

Your dynastic duty

The chapter begins with a well-known quote from Edmund Burke:

Society is indeed a contract… It is to be looked on with other reverence… As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primaeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world.

Meritocracy must start afresh with each new generation. This means that in this era men rise to leadership; they are not born into it. This in turn means

… there are two key questions for the governance of society. First, do elites successfully form hereditary families? Second—and crucially—do elites take advantage of their ability to shape their children to lead from birth?

The legacy, therefore, involves inheriting a sense of duty and the will and wisdom to exercise it. This was the nature of nobility in the agrarian period, before the Industrial Revolution. The elites and commoners had a common sense of place and a sense of their mutual obligations.

Raising children worthy of empires

Kurtz begins with:

Great wealth is a blessing and a curse. Raising upper class children is a demanding, high-risk, high-reward game. Great wealth brings an equally great threat of spiritual corruption. This means that raising privileged children is unlike raising unprivileged children. It must be an intentional and involved process. Recognize that you are creating something exceptional in exceptional circumstances.

Not every scion of a noble family is endowed with the intelligence and temperament to fulfill the obligations of his station. Noble parents must be unsparing in their efforts to mold the children, and must be wise in their discernment when it becomes obvious that the raw material is simply not up to the task.

Assuming that everything is in place, however, the children must still be raised with discipline, knowledge, physical conditioning and social skills appropriate to their station. Their parents must recognize, accept and do their best to satisfy their obligations.

Ritual is important: grace at meals, prayer, holiday celebration, social skills such as dancing and delivering a toast. Such skills reflect high birth and respect for tradition.

Kurtz makes special note of the necessity to give children the opportunity to interact with adults of all stations in life, avoiding the age-separated groupings so characteristic of the modern age.

Thousand-year estates

This chapter is a biography of American Founding Father John Hancock, the first to put his John Hancock on the Declaration of Independence. He was a larger-than-life figure in his accomplishments, his charities, and the esteem in which he was held by the people of Boston.

How they take power

You have to start preparing your children in early childhood. This chapter has a number of suggestions as to how to prepare children to take a leadership position in adult society.

Proper marriage is a major requisite. The heirs must be placed in the society of potential mates early, frequently, and always with expectations placed on their behavior. The ideal outcome is marriage to a suitable partner at a relatively young age, giving them opportunity to produce their own heirs, and providing situating them in such a broad society that divorce would be awkward. Their self-mastery should be such that they choose their mate carefully, after which they commit fully.

If the heirs feel suited to the family business, all the better. If not, the parents should attempt to establish them in some other realm in which they feel comfortable. In every case they should feel an obligation to perform honorably with employees, business associates and family.

Leaving a legacy

Kurtz asks…

And yet is there not a paradox here—an apparent tension with everything that we have seen and learned up until now? Does not Proverbs command us to leave an inheritance for our children’s children?

There is a missing piece which resolves this tension: trust in God. Understanding the impossibility of controlling the future, we are to act virtuously and even to build great things, if this is within our power. But we are to offer them at the Lord’s feet. Only He can carry them into the future.

This chapter is more about charity than heritage. As it should be, because charity is the key to life. If you can afford to do so, use your money to help others start businesses, buy homes and the like.

If you can, lean into this, attempting to pay workers a salary which allows them to buy meaningful property and start families of their own, resulting in a further cascade of charity. Charity requires personal contact and the bonds of community, so go out into your neighborhood and meet people. Find ways to mentor, apprentice, and support young people who find themselves shut out of the system of wealth creation. Buy and hire local to whatever extent you can, even when this is an inconvenience—charity justifies sacrifice. To help with family formation in your town, think about enjoyable ways to get young people together. Perhaps fund a choir or pilgrimages at your church—promising a certain degree of comfort or style to get them interested. Reach out to colleges to see if there are particular societies which you could subsidize to help them get people together in relaxed settings.

In doing these things, we will each be examples to our children, establishing the character of a dynasty, however many generations it may last.

Conclusion

This book extols the values and virtues of prior ages. It celebrates continuity, and respect for one’s ancestors, descendants, relatives and peers. In a word, the traditional Christian values. These are the values that raised our society to world dominance a century or two ago. But the objective is not dominance. That came of its own accord, a natural result of honoring traditional beliefs, values and virtues.

[Brad Bevers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read. Lots of great things here, one of my most highlighted books in a long time. Charity vs. Philanthropy, Nepotism Vs. Working with family, differences in inherited capital, and much more. If you are at all interested in this kind of subject, you will really enjoy this. Here are some of my highlights:

What is charity? Many of us would simply answer ‘giving to others’. But this is wrong. The Christian virtue of ‘charity’ is derived from the Latin ‘caritas’, which is a translation of the Greek ἀγάπη (agapē). Both caritas and agapē refer to the same root concept: love. Unlike ‘charity’ the word ‘love’ does, of course, appear in the parable. This is what charity is and always has been: love for our God, and the extension of this love to our neighbors and friends. Christ states this plainly in John 15:12-13: “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

The fundamental distinction between the correct view of ‘charity as love’ and the misguided modern view of ‘charity as mere giving’ is made clear by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:3: “If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.”

In light of the understanding that charity is love, we begin to understand the necessity of the local component of the commandment to love our neighbor, as opposed to just ‘people’. We cannot truly love who we do not know, who we do not see, and who we do not understand.

Philanthropy cannot replace charity; bureaucracies cannot replace virtuous men and families.

Are you really giving them all that you can? Remember that you have more than money to offer—in fact, you have far more valuable assets: experience, knowledge, skills, relationships, passion, and love. When you separate these essential aspects from charity, chaos results.

One cannot outsource parenting and the cultivation of virtue to the job market.

Where the ‘merit’ criterion is now applied to an adult, it usually means a single factor: ‘relative economic productivity’. The best person for the job is the person we expect to generate the most capital in the role, based on measurable factors which we anticipate are correlated with this productivity (educational attainment and so forth). Unfortunately, making merit synonymous with ‘maximally economically productive’ also makes it synonymous with less desirable factors which might impede that economic productivity. It puts ‘merit’ in tension with moral principles, the desire for a family, ties to a particular place, and broad interests outside work. Psychopaths rise quickly.

Highly Recommended.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible work, and something entirely unique in my life up to this point. Kurtz weaves together Christian doctrine, old virtues, and the practices of the West's great families to create a manual for how a man can leave a legacy. A legacy, in this case, not being a man's mark on the world and the memory he leaves behind, but the positive impact he has on his family, friends, community, and nation, such that he leaves the world better than he found it. I'm not one for re-reading my books, but I will certainly be referring to this book again as my life evolves. 10/10.

[Acanthon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this is a good book for its target audience. If you’re a wealthy Christian who has not considered your legacy seriously, this book will connect with you. Overall though, I don’t think anything in this book is groundbreaking or life-changing and a lot of the suggestions verge on sentimental fantasy for Americans in the 21st century.

Still, I appreciate the message that giving to nameless charities is about as useful as using money to fuel a fireplace.

[Gabriel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Legacy?
'Non Omnis Moriam'.
The Denial of Death.
Preservation, continuity, transmission of something worth preserving and transmitting.
A sense of responsability towards those that preceded me and which built and preserved that which they bequeathed me; but also an equal sense of responsibility towards those kin of mine that will inherit the legacy which was granted to me and which I, in my turn, will grant to them.
The continuity must not be broken.

[Thomas Kidd · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that is likely truly applicable to few, but hopefully aspirational for all.

[Erasmas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A timely polemic addressing these selfish and wasteful generations who are determined to disinherit and impoverish their own children.

[Caleb · Rating 5 out of 5]

So great. Definitely just a primer, but it’s enough to completely change your outlook about your future generations.

[Lucy R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting. Really enjoyed.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome book. Touches on class structures, why the adoption of meritocracy has been horrible for the family and society, what true charity and philanthropy are, what to think about with inheritances, the value of family honor, the need for family rituals (especially the dinner table), and the benefit of aristocracies. Also, John Hancock had a solid uncle.