We don’t think enough about dynasties as artifacts. If I want to change the world, my best hope is through the generations of my own children. We are all, like Abraham, parents of nations. One might privilege public action over parenting – the struggle to change structures, rules, relationships. But any action to change society is immediately subject to a thousand normalizing forces. The basic patterns absorb most efforts to change them, without changing much. What one needs for social change is an action that keeps acting, a smart action that adapts and regroups and reformulates itself over hundreds of years, with always the same idea in view. One needs, in short, a child, and then a family, and ultimately, a dynasty.
Some families know about creating dynasties, and they have developed the psychological tools for the job. Other families just get by. In public, we act as if dynasties were of the very first importance, choosing our ministers and professors and political leaders from dynastic clans. But we don’t talk about this, and the ethics of dynasty formation is still to be written.
The big things are always just at the edge of vision