Who to speak your mind to, when you know what’s right.
The six different languages of money are the most popular ways for talking to people about values. Not every language is designed to talk about all values. You need to choose the language that values the values you want to be talking about. And what language you choose determines what people you talk to.
Who is both motivated to agree with you, and empowered to take action?
What actions are they actually empowered to take?
Are those the actions we need to be taking, to value the values you want to be valuing?
When the values we want to be valuing are the values of a new prosperity of peace – peace with ourselves, peace with each other, peace with our planet, and peace with our future – only four of the six languages of money – only four of the six Capitalisms – are potentially aligned with those values.
Also, our times have changed. We have a new future. We need a new prosperity. The right new prosperity for our new times is the peace of sufficient surpluses circulating sufficiently, throughout the population and across the generations
These are:
- Family & Friends aggregating surpluses saved for caring for our own, and deploying those aggregations into enterprising visions that value IMPACT, speaking the language of Patronage.
- Church & Philanthropy aggregating surpluses saved for caring for others, and deploying those aggregations into enterprising visions that value MISSION, speaking the language of Grants.
- Taxing & Spending aggregating surpluses saved for public health, public safety and public welfare, and deploying those aggregations into enterprising visions that value POLICY, speaking the language of Contracts and Subsidies.
- Pensions & Endowments aggregating surpluses saved for programmatically providing certainty against certain of life’s uncertainties, and deploying those aggregations into enterprising visions that value PEACE, speaking the language of Negotiated Agreements for Prioritizing Cash Flows.
Banking & Lending aggregating surpluses saved for managing money, and deploying those aggregations into enterprising visions that value PROFITS, speaking the language of Credit and Collateral Value, is not structurally incompatible with peace as the right new measure of prosperity
Exchanges & Funds aggregating surpluses saved for opportunistic and idiosyncrative wealth building, and deploying those aggregations into enterprising visions that value GROWTH, speaking the language of Speculation, are.
The most powerful of the forms of Finance that are aligned with a new prosperity of peace is also the most directly aligned. That is Pensions & Endowments, as superfiduciary stewards of society’s superfunds that are aggregated to programmatically provide certainty against certain of life’s uncertainties, throughout the population, and across the generations.
Superfiduciaries are the finance professionals we can and should be engaging most directly in conversations about investing in inquiry, insights, enterprise and exchange that fosters and promotes a new prosperity of peace.
The question that now needs to be answered is,
Where?
The peace we are pursuing must truly be a global peace, because our new reality in the 21st Century is that we have the earth, and it is well and truly ours. Also, it is what we have. There are no other known inhabitable planets. The earth is our garden. We must become good global gardeners
Where can we find the superfiduciary stewards of society’s superfunds? And where can we engage with them in conversation about investing in peace?
For this, we need to create by design new places that are fiduciary spaces that are safe places for superfiduciaries to engage with People Who Care in conversations about the future history we can, should and want to be making through investments in inquiry, insight, enterprise and exchange.
And within these new spaces, we have to create new protocols for popular participation in curated conversations for adaptively evolving the common sense and common wisdom of The Hypothetical Reasonable Person as the legal standard of ordinary prudence for ordinary fiduciaries, and of extraordinary prudence for superfiduciaries.
This brings us to a radical rethinking of the role of the University in Finance, and of the possibilities for adding Finance to the Humanities as a way of putting humanity back into Finance.
Conversations between superfidciaries and People Who Care about investment in Enterprise have to be curated by experts both to correctly facilitate positive engagement, and to keep the expectations roughly within the broad parameters of what recognized experts currently know to be true.
There are many good reasons why visionary leaders of creative enterprises cannot, for the good of all, be required to remain within the boundaries of what recognized experts think we know. But when we do venture out onto the creative edge of new knowledge, then we have also ventured into speculative investing. We already have a good place to finance speculative ventures. It is Wall Street. Superfiduciaries should not be speculating with society’s shared savings. Superfiduciary investing can and should remain, for the most part anyway, within the boundaries of what recognized experts think we know, a safe distance back from the creative edge of new learning that is till not yet well-tested learning.
What better place to hold curated conversations that remain within the boundaries of what recognized experts think we know, then in the university? Especially the University that is located within or adjacent to a city center of an urban cluster of bioregional uniqueness, offering convenient access to Superfiduciaries, Visionaries and People Who Care, while being fully equipped with Resident Experts, physically configured for curated conversations, and philosophically aligned with the values that are valued in the concept of popular participation in adaptively evolving the common sense and common wisdom of The Hypothetical Reasonable Person.