Conservative Historian

Youth Must be Served

December 16, 2022
Conservative Historian
Youth Must be Served
Show Notes Transcript

We look to Michelangelo, Mozart, and JFK to give us some insight as to why people gave so much of their money to 30-year-old "wunderkind" Sam Bankman-Fried. 

Youth Must Be Served

December 2022

 

“The future of the world belongs to the youth of the world, and it is from the youth and not from the old that the fire of life will warm and enlighten the world. It is your privilege to breathe the breath of life into the dry bones of many around you.” 

Thomas Mann

  

“Youth is wasted on the young. 

George Bernard Shaw

  

“In youth and beauty, wisdom is but rare!”

Homer

 

The term "Youth Must Be Served" is one of those common phrases for which there is no origin. On the Baby Boomers Blog, Larry Teery writes, "Go type into a search engine box "who said 'youth must be served'?" You won't get the answer you'd expect. Instead of showing you several links to the story behind the origin of this saying, you get various news articles about giving in to the young generation. It seems no one wants to take credit for such a remark." 

 

We do not know its origins, but there are several explanations of the phrase, including "Young people should be treated with forbearance while given enough freedom to express and understand themselves" and "youth will have its course." 

 

Teery notes, "As a baby boomer generation kid, I was always told to shut up because children should be seen and not heard. I was also told to respect my elders and give up a seat on the bus or train to one if the situation required it. I was told to help an older person if it looked like they needed it. My aunts and uncles were always addressed first with the title and then their name. If I even thought about saying just their name in discussing them with a parent, I would have been slapped silly."  

 

Do I expect this kind of return to prior conventions when adults, especially older ones, were treated with a deference and respect now reserved for football coaches and billionaires? 

It was never really in my makeup to be addressed by my children as "father" or my nieces and nephews as "uncle." But that is no longer a choice we have. To expect youth to treat their elders in today's society in such a fashion is like pushing a 600-pound boulder up a hill.  

 

This is not to say that the elderly are disrespected and the they are definitely not disadvantaged in our society. On the contrary, I have long argued that due to the insanity of our entitlement system, which enables the elderly to spend a 3rd of their lives in retirement, and the benefits they consume, especially in terms of health resources, along with the knowledge that older adults vote, we live in a sort of gerontocracy. But that is the hard economic reality.  

 

In our cultural world, we are firmly, and sometimes mistakenly, bound to youth. There is little need for forbearance for the young's follies because they are not tolerated in many ways but are in charge. It is as if the rest of society, the over-40 crowd, needs to serve their needs. Partly this is due to the advent of information technology and the acceleration of cycles of change. A younger mind can keep up better, and growing up with screens, something that at gen Xers myself did not, confers an advantage. As the Business commentator Peter F Drucker noted, "The correct assumption is that what individuals have learned by age twenty-one will begin to become obsolete five to ten years later and will have to be replaced or at least refurbished by new learning, new skills, new knowledge."

 

I get why we love youth. I am of an age where I have a foot in both camps. I help with several octogenarians and even one nonagenarian. But I also have young adult 20-something children who, obviously, congregate with their peers, so on many occasions, the home is filled with the young.  

 

There is just something about youth. They have energy and vitality. Even a modest-looking 25-year-old would be a beauty or Adonis if they dwelt in a place where there were no other people than sixty-somethings or older. I never fully realized this until I began visiting college campuses in my oldest child's 17th year. In only gest more obvious when there are thousands of young people in a single location.

 

In the Zach Efron movie 17 Again, the middle-aged protagonist, transformed into his 17-year-old self, notes while playing a pickup basketball game with his peers, "We are all in such great shape!" But, of course, 25-year-olds need not hit the gym daily or swear off Mcdonald's; they look better. A marginally handsome youth or pretty girl at a University is one of the crowd. They would be the resident hottie at Del Webb or one of the thousands of Orlando retirement communities.  

 

Faster metabolisms, youthful sheens, and of course, less wear and tear. None have yet to stay up all night with a sick child, as I have on countless occasions. They have not had the stress of hundreds of business presentations or rigorous, five cities in five-day travel. Many will, just not yet. And there is the conversation. Everything is new and fresh.  

 

So it is not hard to see our attention and, yes, envy. But it is not just in the physical but the cultural as well where they dominate. In an article in Psychology Today entitled, "Forever Young: America's Obsession With Never Growing Old, writer, and MD, Dale Archer writes, "Today'sToday's culture is so obsessed with looking/acting young, it's difficult to believe that our founding fathers powdered their wigs gray in order to appear older and wiser. That's right—being old was in. No more. From hair dyes to Botox to Viagra to wrinkle creams to a plethora of surgical procedures, the race is on to remain forever young.

 

Archer adds, "There are many reasons America is so obsessed with youth, but perhaps nothing has done more to further the cause than the technological revolution. Let's face it—the old are, by and large, slower and not as connected. How many over 60 do you know that have Twitter, Facebook, or a cutting-edge smartphone? Throughout the advances in technology, the quest to remain young has accelerated at warp speed. Why, when previously, gray hair and wrinkles coincided with patience, self-awareness, and wisdom? As Hannibal Lecter told Clarice in Silence of the Lambs, "We begin by coveting what we see every day."  Archer explains through the prism of technology that this is relatively new. He has a point, but gray wigs aside, history has shown itself to be as besotted with youth as American culture today. But there is something more at work here. Something historical. 

 

"And since, in the end, civilization depends on man extending his powers of mind and spirit to the utmost, we must reckon the appearance of Michelangelo's David as one of the great events in the history of Western man." This is from Kenneth Clark's "Civilization: The Hero as Artist"

 

The biblical, quasi-historical David is referred to as the "most beautiful among the sons of men" in Psalm 44, and the name "David" was translated to mean "beloved." And as such, a fascination to Renaissance artists.  

 

As noted in Thomas Cahills, Heretics and Heroes, his book on the Renaissance and Reformation, Cahill notes how Michelangelo broke with tradition by depicting David, the underdog Israelite shepherd boy, before he fell Goliath the Philistine with his slingshot and beheaded him. Donatello and Verrocchio, Michelangelo's Florentine predecessors, portrayed David after the battle, with the giant's decapitated head at his feet. And in Donatello's version, David's gender is almost ambiguous, especially from the back. The other critical piece here is Donatello's David, which pre-dates Michelangelo's by nearly 60 years, is younger, still very much a young teen. At 17 feet, Michelangelo's David is also colossal and a comparatively older, more muscular youth. However, he is relaxed yet concentrated and confident, standing in a contrapposto pose, an ancient Greek innovation wherein the subject's weight shifts primarily to one foot stepping forward, creating a curved, asymmetrical stance. Also, he is completely undressed, another nod to the Greeks, whose nude male subjects exemplify the ideal hero. 

 

It was the Greeks to which Donatello, Michelangelo, and the Renaissance artists looked, and there too, the ideal of human beauty is equated with youth. But this is not just an artist's rendition.  

 

Here are a few descriptions of Alexander of Macedon. This description from the Macedonian Collection at New York's Metropolitan Museum, "At the age of twenty, already a charismatic and decisive leader, Alexander quickly harnessed the Macedonian forces that his father's reforms had made into the premier military power in the region." And History.com. "Alexander was just 16 when Philip went off to battle and left his son in charge of Macedonia. In 338 B.C., Alexander saw the opportunity to prove his military worth and led a cavalry against the Sacred Band of Thebes—a supposedly unbeatable, select army made up entirely of male lovers—during the Battle of Chaeronea." 

 

When descriptions of Cyrus the Great, Qin Chi Huang Di, Hannibal, or Julius Caesar are provided, their ages are rarely cited. Yet Alexander's youth is usually there. But it was more than the things he did when he was young. Instead, it is that he will be forever young. Thanks to his insatiable urge for world supremacy, he started plans to conquer Arabia. But he'd never live to see it happen. After surviving battle after a fierce battle, Alexander the Great died in June 323 B.C. at age 32.

 

Same as when descriptions are made of Mozart. Arguably the most gifted musician in the history of classical music. His inspiration is often described as 'divine,' but he worked assiduously to become the great composer he was and a conductor, virtuoso pianist, organist, and violinist. But here is one description. Mozart was a musician capable of playing multiple instruments who started playing in public at the age of 6. Mozart wrote operas and piano concertos and was famous before he left his teens. But like Alexander, he died young, at the age of 35. 

 

John F Kennedy is one of the few palatable Democratic politicians to my jaded conservative way of thinking. But his celebrity, the "I know where I was when I heard he was shot” fame rests on his youth, both when he took office and three years later, the preservation in amber due to his assignation. Coming after Eisenhower, who was 70 when he left office, the 43-year-old Kennedy with his beautiful wife and young children seemed to usher in a better age, the New Frontier as it would be called. 

 

But unlike Reagan, not descent into senility and hidden away. No doddering HW Bush at the end or gadfly Jimmy Carter writing his books and still, 40 years after his failed presidency, still getting it wrong. Instead, like Alexander and Mozart, Kennedy is preserved in amber, forever the picture of youth.  

 

We love the precocious, but often outstanding achievements, late in life, do not warrant the same attention. For example, Ray Kroc, of McDonald's fame, bought the burger joint and began its expansion at age 59. Yet this usually comes later in his biographies. And sure, we celebrate older people but note how often they are celebrated for doing things that young people take for granted. Hey, that 75-year-old just completed a marathon, or gramps just parachuted. It is almost quaint and slightly patronizing. Seniors are only relevant when they are doing things that young people accomplish.

 

And all of this, rather circuitously, brings up Samuel-Bankman Fried. I like to rip on Fortune because this once proud magazine used to write compelling and insightful articles about business. In the last 20 years, however, it is descended into a woke propagandist (they LOVE green companies) or just downright crapola. But I will give credit to an admirable job of CYA by writer Jeff John Roberts. Here is a description of Fried from Fortune in August, "30-year-old billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried has been called the next Warren Buffett. His counterintuitive investment strategy will either build him an empire—or end in disaster." 

 

Roberts writes, "Sam Bankman-Fried does not look like the most powerful man in crypto. Friendly and rumpled, with an unruly halo of curly hair, the 30-year-old widely known as SBF has an affinity for League of Legends, fidget spinners, and other trappings of nerd culture. But underneath the goofy facade is a trading wunderkind whose ambition knows no limits. An MIT physics grad, SBF honed his trading skills at renowned quant shop Jane Street Capital before launching a successful firm of his own, Alameda Research. In 2019 he founded crypto exchange FTX, hailed by some as the best derivatives platform ever built." This is from Forbes last year, "It's a hazy late-summer evening when Sam Bankman-Fried drifts into Electric Lemon, a "clean, conscious" eatery on the 24th floor of the five-star Equinox Hotel in Manhattan's Hudson Yards complex. The 29-year-old cryptocurrency billionaire has jetted in from Hong Kong in part to cohost this private party but nonetheless tries to slink to the corner of the room unnoticed. 

 

Authors start with a physical description and then note the age. Yet when writing about another Crypto titan, the CEO of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, no age, "Coinbase Global Inc. Chief Executive Officer Brian Armstrong said the cryptocurrency exchange's revenue is set to be cut by half or more this year as declining prices and the collapse of rival FTX rattle investors' confidence." Here is another from Forbes, "In late October, Brian Armstrong, the CEO of cryptocurrency exchange operator Coinbase, oversaw a financing round in which the company he cofounded raised $300 million at a valuation of $8 billion. At that valuation, Armstrong's stake in Coinbase is worth an estimated $1.3 billion after applying a customary discount for privately held companies." 

 

Now it is not that Armstrong is some senior citizen; he is shy of 40, but that benchmark, for some 40 and others 30, is the line between youth and the rest of us. And, of course, Fortune has it's 40 under 40 issues. 50 over 50? Sexiest 60s over 60? The octogenarian 8? Not so much. And in Fortune's case, and I write this with a bit of glee, their wokism and ageism culminated in naming Rebekah Jones to their 40 under 40 issues during Covid in 2020. But it was not her information skills but rather her opposition to Ron DeSantis' non-lockdowns in Florida, violating leftist COVID dogma, which is why they featured her. It certainly had little to do with reporting or strong business journalism. "What do you do if your state refuses to publish accurate data? If you're Rebekah Jones, you do it yourself. The geospatial scientist designed and managed the COVID-19 tracking dashboard for Florida's Department of Health. But Jones says that when she refused to fudge the numbers—which would be used to determine if the state was ready to reopen—the department fired her in May, citing "insubordination." (The governor's office disputes Jones' version of events.)." 

 

So here is what really happened. Here is Charles W Cooke on the real Jones, "Jones is seriously bad news. So far from being an exception, her firing by the Florida Department of Health was the norm. This is a person who has accused the African-American epidemiologist who is currently serving as Florida's deputy secretary of health of being a "murderer." This is a person who has called the Florida Department of Law Enforcement the "Gestapo." Worst of all, this is a person who has been either dismissed or charged with a crime, pretty much wherever she has gone. In Louisiana, she was charged with assaulting a police officer, and she avoided multiple misdemeanor convictions only by entering into a pre-trial intervention program. In Florida, she was fired from FSU for having sex with a student in her class. She also was fired from the Department of Health for insubordination. And she is currently awaiting two trials — one on a felony charge for illegally accessing government systems and downloading private personnel data, the other on a misdemeanor stalking charge that was initially subject to deferred prosecution but is now live again as a result of her other behavior." 

 

And this gets up back to Bankman Fried; Tory Newmyer, writing for the Washington Post, states, "Sam Bankman-Fried, the 30-year-old wunderkind of cryptocurrency, spent tens of millions of dollars over the past year trying to reshape how Washington and the world think about finance.

 

The crypto exchange he founded, FTX, had become an industry-dominating business in just three years, valued at $32 billion as recently as January. He amassed political clout in an even bigger hurry, emerging from obscurity to become the second-biggest Democratic donor in the midterm elections.

 

By Friday, the money and the clout had disappeared: Bankman-Fried resigned from FTX, which then filed for bankruptcy. On Saturday, the company revealed it was investigating "unauthorized transactions" worth more than $400 million and that it had moved all funds into offline storage. And Bankman-Fried was left facing harrowing questions about his role in the most catastrophic collapse the notoriously volatile crypto industry has so far seen." 

 

Full disclosure, I do not really get crypto. I mean, on a certain level, I do. I mean, after all, what is money or cash? It is about putting value into a mode of exchange to alleviate the burden of actually trading goods. Instead of an ancient farmer having to give the plow maker 20 bushels of wheat for this trouble, he can provide cash. Barter is inefficient. But even in highly sophisticated societies such as our 2022 variety, my $20 bill with Jackson on it (soon to be Tubman) only has value because it is backed by the full faith of the U.S. government, which in turn has contracted (read taxes) out to collect money to backfill said currency. An actual $20 bill is worth about 50 cents in paper and ink. Its value derives from the power behind it.  

 

The beauty of crypto is no more exchanges, no more what is the dollar to the baht. And in an era in which so many transactions occur both electronically and thus automatically, I see the reason for crypto, just not yet.  

 

No doubt Bankman-Fried's investors will be screaming that Congress (shudder) do something. So I say caveat emptor to them, and the caveats abounded with FTX. First my aforementioned I do not really get it. But this is where Bankman-Fried's youth was a double whammy to the common sense of the fools who gave him their cash. Not only was he young with his tousled hair and mangy t-shirts, and we love the young, but his youth was to provide an insight into crypto. You just do not get it, says the young to the old. And in our youth-obsessed culture, what an indictment that drives foolish acts like giving that idiot hard-earned cash. 

 

I am adding Holmes, the recently convicted CEO of Theranos, to this mix.  Before Theranos was the talk of healthcare business a magazine, you gussed it, Fortune again wrote a cover story about Holmes. Commenting on the article, writer Paul Farhi notes, "The story was 5,500 words of pure rapture about a Silicon Valley company few had ever heard of and its intriguing chief executive. Theranos, declared in Fortune magazine in 2014, appeared to be on the verge of revolutionizing the healthcare industry with a wondrous new technology for diagnosing diseases with just a few drops of blood.

 

The magazine's cover put a human face on the company's alleged breakthroughs. Theranos's founder, a young woman named Elizabeth Holmes, stared at readers with serene blue eyes and a Mona Lisa smile. "This CEO Is Out for Blood," the headline read. Emblematic of the gushy, overly credulous business and tech journalism ascendant at the time, Fortune's story touched off a media stampede that transformed Holmes, then 30, into a business superstar." Note that Farsi knowing now that Theranos is corrupt and Holmes is now in jail mentions her age. He gets it. She staffed her board of directors with older, much older men. Powerful and connected, but not wise. If the George Shultz's or James Mattis's had been wise, they might have noticed that Theranos, a medical device manufacturer dealing in blood analysis, had no medical device manufacturers on the board, physicians, or phlebotomists. Instead, they were dazzled by Holmes's youth and moderate good looks. They were part of something cool, and they got it. 

I imagine Schultz sitting next to his fellow octogenarians telling how Holmes was like a fountain of youth to him. 

 

If Bankman-Fried, Holmes, or Jones had been in their 50s, it is hard to see so many approaching them with such credulity.  And it is not just Jones. I have long noted that if Alexandria Ocasio Cortez does not look as she does, she would not get the press. She is attractive but also young, which helps with her attractiveness. It is hard to imagine a 56 bartender defeating Democratic Caucus Chair Joe Crowley, a 10-term incumbent, in what was widely seen as the most significant upset victory in the 2018 midterm. 

 

Much has been made about Bankman-Fried's contribution to Democrats and his "correct" read left-of-center positions on the day's issues. That is fine, but if that were all it took to attract investors, then Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren would rival Blackrock for total wealth. Investors may care a little about the fund manager's politics, but they care far more about getting money.  

 

Now, as a listener to the Conservative Historian I imagine you dear listener to be erudite and well read, so you are probably thinking, Bernie Madoff!  This villain was well into his sixties by the time his nefarious use of investor funds caught up with him.  But that is part of the point. Madoff began trading in 1960, nearly 40 years before his getting caught.  And though one trader claimed the fraud began in 1970s, Madoff himself stated in began in the 90s, thirty years after he began. In other words, a would be investor would have looked at 30 years of success, in a well recognized business.  Madoff even covered his tracks by Madoff was active in the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), a self-regulatory securities-industry organization. He served as chairman of its board of directors, and was a member of its board of governors. Even a savvy investor would have issues finding the problems that arose later.  But in the cases of Bankman Fried, Holmes and Jones it would take about two days of work to discern that something was amiss.  Certainly worth the time if the investment was sizable enough.  But many of these investors did not conduct due diligence, they panic bought to be with the cool kid.  

 

And here we turn to Homer; youth and wisdom do not go together. That is the essential quality that must be added here in these examples. It was unwise to invest in Bankman-Fried and Holmes. Unwise, given her previous track record, which was public knowledge, to believe Jones. And though AOC has a certain cunning regarding social media, one struggles to find anything wise or profound in her voluminous commentary.  

 

This is not to say that age equates directly to wisdom. The American playwright Edward Albee said, When you get old, you can't talk to people because people snap at you... That's why you become deaf, so you won't be able to hear people talking to you that way. And the great curmudgeon HL Menken once said The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom. Personally, I have sat with those who have not worked since the Clinton administration, bitterly complaining because a waitress was 20 minutes late with his lunch check. You know, because they need to get back to what exactly? You usually do not get this stuff with the young. But what you also do not get is wisdom, Shakespeare noted, "The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool." And Socrates noted, "The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." Imagine if investors, not bedazzled by Bankman-Fried's youth and techie knowledge, had assumed that they knew nothing about crypto and set out to learn. Imagine if they had invested in the promise of the funds or the viability of the business plan instead of Bankman-Fried himself. As I noted, if he were in his 50s, investors would have thought more like Socrates and not some fanboy.  

 

The incomparable singer Whitney Houston once sang, "I believe the children are our future.

Teach them well and let them lead the way." It is a good thing her voice was so beautiful because it is hard to think of any so inane and vacuous. Yes, youth is the future, but that does not mean that every pronouncement, every business, and every political position needs to be our present. At least not until they gain a dollop of wisdom.  Celebrate youth. Encourage them, give them your guidance and council.  But maybe give a bit of thought, and a lot of research before you give them your money, or the cover of your once respectable publication.