In my circles, many men came from humble, hardworking backgrounds and are now wildly successful, whether through crypto, investments, business, or other ventures. They are beginning families, and their biggest concern is: how do we raise children without spoiling them?

Part of their success came from the experience of dealing with scarcity and pressure as young adults. Their children will grow up with abundance and the option to live off trust funds. But doing nothing is soul-rotting. Idleness corrodes the soul, dissolves dignity, and invites decline. Human beings, left unchecked, will nearly always take the path of least resistance, avoiding effort, abandoning discipline, and consuming what others built until nothing remains.

You can see this decay in families that failed to pass down standards. Hunter Biden, son of the ex-president, is a cautionary tale: drug abuse, foreign influence peddling, and public humiliation despite immense privilege and opportunity. Another example is Anderson Cooper, son of Gloria Vanderbilt. Though born into generational wealth and media prestige, he has publicly rejected inheritance, lives untethered to family legacy, and serves as a corporate mouthpiece rather than a cultural steward. Finally, consider the case of Redstone heir Sumner Redstone’s children, especially Shari Redstone, whose battles over ViacomCBS revealed dysfunction, entitlement, and a loss of coherent family strategy. Wealth without discipline breeds infighting and institutional collapse.

By contrast, consider the old merchant families of Venice. Many of the same bloodlines that dominated Venetian commerce and politics in the Middle Ages still quietly control vast assets today. They keep a low profile, marry well, raise competent heirs, and live orderly, productive lives. Unless you live in Venice and move within their circles, you would never know their names. Their secret is simple: continuity of values, long-game thinking, and a refusal to trade dignity for display.

So how do you build resilience into the next generation??

The Mennonite Model

Mennonite communities provide a living example of wealth managed without decay. Many families within these groups have quietly accumulated significant assets through farming, craftsmanship, small business ownership, frugality, and simple living. Yet even among the wealthy, external lifestyle markers remain modest.

The key is cultural discipline. Wealth does not buy exemption from productive labor, communal expectation, or ancestral continuity. Instead, money is treated as a security buffer, used for stability, not indulgence.

Work remains central. Children and adults alike are expected to produce with their hands, regardless of family net worth.

Cultural values are enforced. Modesty, obedience, and self-restraint are not optional. They are communal obligations.

Wealth is reinvested. Excess is directed into land, tools, or community infrastructure, not consumption.

Families are cohesive. Children are expected to marry well, raise their own children with integrity, and remain close to the family center. Those who wish to leave are free to do so, but by leaving they remove themselves from influence over the community. This functions as a natural eugenic filter: only those most inclined to protect and extend the group’s genetic and cultural continuity remain, while outside influences drift away rather than undermining the core.

No lifestyle inflation. Social status is tied to character, not material display.

However, the Mennonite model is not without tradeoffs. It is a low-culture, low-tech model. These communities typically avoid advanced technology, high art, complex architecture, or musical innovation. For those of us who value beauty, invention, and civilizational excellence, this model, while admirable, must be adapted.

The challenge, then, is to combine Mennonite discipline with aristocratic refinement. To raise children who can steward not only wealth, but also culture, technology, and spiritual dignity.

The Trifunctional Society

Europe’s leap beyond all other civilizations was not a matter of natural resources or early discovery. It was structural. As tribal societies grew, they separated roles that once coexisted within every man. From a time when each tribesman was priest, warrior, and craftsman in one, the continent moved into a structured trifunctional order: the priestly caste (spiritual and intellectual authority), the warrior caste (defense and governance), and the producer caste (agriculture, craft, commerce).

This specialization allowed for deep mastery. For the first time, a class could focus entirely on metaphysics, another on conquest and law, another on the production of food, tools, and wealth. This was the engine of European ascent. Even where Europe did not originate a discipline, it perfected it through functional stratification.

But that model may have reached its end. The walls between castes are no longer gates to mastery; they are barriers to survival.

Today, every man must be priest, warrior, and producer.

Priest: He must understand his own spiritual nature. He must act in alignment with Natural Law and lead his household with moral clarity.

Warrior: He must defend himself, his family, and his property. He must develop physical courage and strategic competence to understand the law and enforce it.

Producer: He must feed, build, repair, and generate. He must create value and sustain those under his care.

This is not regression to the primitive, but transcendence of rigid caste. The Anglo-Saxon tradition hints at this synthesis: the king was expected to embody all three. He was a sacred figure, a judge and protector, and a steward of the land. His conduct was said to affect the fertility of the fields and the health of the people. As the king was, so was the kingdom.

By reintegrating the three castes within ourselves, we are becoming kings—sovereigns in the truest sense. Technology gives us access to knowledge once reserved for clerics. Instability and institutional decay demands that we all stand ready to fight. And wealth and technology gives us tools of production once out of reach.

This reintegration is not optional. Pursuing any one caste in isolation—whether priest, warrior, or producer, can lead to imbalance. Intellectualism without labor becomes sterile and divorced from reality. Labor without spirit becomes servile. Combat without cultivation becomes barbaric. Without integration, men become abstracted, disembodied, disconnected from nature, duty, and meaning. To endure and build in this age, we must reclaim totality. We must once again become whole men.

We must become KINGS.

Modern Slavery

In modernity, the problem is not simply misalignment within the caste system, it is that most people do not even qualify for it. Historically, a functioning society recognized three castes: priest, warrior, and producer. If you did not contribute in one of those domains, you were cast out. There were two categories of outcast: the slave, who at least labored under command, and the feral, the beast-like destroyer who contributed nothing and only consumed or destabilized.

Today, many live as slaves, not in chains, but in spirit. They are enslaved to debt, to appetite, to ideology, to entertainment. They do not lead, they do not protect, and they do not produce. A smaller but growing number have descended even lower. These are the criminal, the addicted, the insane. They act as destroyers, not just non-contributors. Historically, these were called by words that translated roughly as ‘wild beasts.’

Our goal is not to shame them but to call them up. A healthy society invites men upward, out of slavery, out of ferality, and into a place of sovereignty. To be inside the caste system is not to be confined, it is to belong, to be protected, to be honored. It is to carry duty and enjoy interdependence with others who have earned their place.

But the idea of becoming kings will be offensive to many. To those who fear responsibility, who cannot imagine mastery over appetite, or who recoil at the call to defend and build, this path will sound cruel or elitist. I do not expect this message to appeal to everyone.

But if it calls to you, I would like to hear from you.

The Neo-Gentry

The Neo-Gentry are the modern synthesis of Mennonite discipline and aristocratic refinement. They reject the decadence of legacy elites and the cultural minimalism of low-tech separatists. Their families cultivate both moral resilience and civilizational excellence.

They understand that wealth is a crucible: it either purifies or corrodes. To survive it, a family must build a system that binds behavior to consequence, without sacrificing beauty, ambition, or grace.

Manual excellence + mental refinement. Children are raised to work with both their hands and their minds. There is no false dichotomy between building artifacts in the real world, a chair, a home, a field of wheat, and pursuing intellectual or artistic excellence. These domains strengthen one another. Not only do different phases of life lend themselves to different pursuits, but integration across them keeps a person grounded, balanced, and whole. No one is allowed to specialize in idleness or consumption.

Visible standards + hidden wealth. Families live with dignity and order. They display virtue, not opulence. Their wealth is shielded from public envy and internal erosion. They are not ashamed of being wealthy. They are not ashamed of having inherited money or coming from so-called privilege. On the contrary, they embrace the fruits of their ancestors’ sacrifice and honor that inheritance through restraint, taste, and disciplined enjoyment. They do not waste; they steward. And in doing so, they give their children pride without arrogance, and privilege without rot.

Cultural continuity + technological competence. They preserve ancestral rituals while embracing the tools of the age. Their homes are sites of memory, beauty and innovation.

Estate-centered life + local responsibility. The family estate is the operational and moral center. While they do not posture as global custodians, the Neo-Gentry carry a noblesse oblige toward their local community, especially toward those whose ancestors did not or could not build the same legacy. But their charity does not erode agency. It invites others, families, neighbors, rising dynasties, to join them in sovereignty, in stewardship, and in restoring continuity.

Building A New Aristocracy. They network with other like-minded Neo-Gentry families, forming bonds of mutual defense against political, economic, and martial threats. These alliances safeguard shared values and assets while creating a relational infrastructure for future generations. As part of this aristocratic renewal, they also act as patrons of the arts, supporting what is good, true, and beautiful. They seek the finer things in life, not ostentatiously, but as part of living well and giving life meaning through beauty and truth. It is within these high-trust circles that marriage partners are often sought.

Marriage as alliance + bond. Marriage is understood as a strategic union between Neo-Gentry families, an alliance with long-term cultural, economic, and moral consequences. Spouses are chosen for shared values, demonstrated virtue, and compatibility that extends across generations. Romantic sentiment is welcome, but never sovereign. Family strength begins in mate selection.Divorce is strongly discouraged. The community provides structure, support, and intervention to help couples resolve conflict and build lasting harmony. Elders and parents take an active role in helping young people vet potential matches, bringing generational wisdom to bear on one of the most consequential decisions of a life.Cheating, adultery, and abandonment are considered betrayals, not only of the spouse, but of the lineage. Marriage is for life, and the Neo-Gentry take that vow as seriously as they take land, oath, or legacy. Gender roles within this order are unapologetically traditional. Men are encouraged to be fully masculine, women to be fully feminine, but both are expected to express these traits in an aristocratic manner, marked by maturity, dignity, and restraint. Men are to embody disciplined strength, vision, and provision. Women are to embody beauty, transmutation, and care. Yet both are also taught to understand and respect the language of the opposite sex, bridging polarity with empathy rather than dissolving it. This preservation of sexual polarity sustains the reproductive energy of the family and ensures that each generation desires marriage not merely for sentiment, but for the duty of producing children. Without this polarity, fertility collapses and generations shrink; with it, they grow strong and enduring.

Power with responsibility. The Neo-Gentry recognize that if they do not seize and guard power, others will seize it over them. They therefore cultivate power first over themselves, then over their households, and finally in defense of their estates and communities. They are not afraid of power. They wield it justly, with restraint, and always for the benefit of their bloodline and their people.

The Neo-Gentry do not seek applause or external social validation. They seek continuity. Their lives are not built for spectacle, but for succession. They see wealth as a generational burden, not a personal trophy. And in doing so, they build houses that do not fall when the flood comes.

How To Become Neo-Gentry

Those who will form the future Neo-Gentry will commit to at least the following disciplines. These are practical steps you can begin immediately within your own household. You may not achieve them in full at once, but you can start and watch the change take root. Recognize that this is intergenerational work: it may take more than one lifetime to raise your family into Neo-Gentry stature.

Most people will never attempt this. They are content to remain slaves of appetite, ideology, and system. But if you desire sovereignty, and if this path calls to you, here is where you begin.

Codify standards. The family needs a clear ethical and behavioral framework, as clear and binding as a religion. It should cover consumption, sexual mores, aesthetics, health and fitness, conflict resolution, and the defense of in-group loyalties. This must be documented, agreed upon, and drilled until it becomes part of the children’s identity.

Engineer hardship. Children need to do hard things and face controlled deprivation: martial arts, hiking, fasting, farm work, chores, property maintenance. Wealth disconnects people from reality; sweat, risk, and survival pressures reconnect them.

Teach stewardship. Children must learn to manage wealth, property, and employees with competence and honor. That means building loyalty, leading justly, and understanding the difference between using resources and being consumed by them.

Embed financial literacy. Children should be taught early how the family fund operates, not just maintenance, but growth. They should see wealth as a sovereign investment engine, not a source of free stuff. Loans are for productive enterprises, which must return more than they borrow.

Prepare children for adult life. Raise sons and daughters with the explicit goal of preparing them for marriage and child-rearing. You are only a successful parent if your children have children. This means cultivating sexual polarity, teaching relationship skills, and showing them how to parent. Do not assume they will absorb this by example alone, train them directly, and seek outside help if necessary.

Signal and ally. Send up a flare. Make it known that your family is moving in a higher direction. Seek out other families pursuing the same path, whether through local networks or social media, and form alliances. These strategic bonds will reinforce your growth and give your children a pool of peers raised to similar standards, increasing their chances of finding worthy marriage partners.

ADVANCED: Anchor the family. A family estate, even a humble one, acts as headquarters. Residency should be free for members who follow the rules and resolve conflicts according to the family code. Proximity forces cooperation and bond-building. Only those who live on the estate should have a vote or inheritance rights; leave, and you leave the benefits behind.

Conclusion

The pattern of history is clear: wealthy families that survive across generations do so by embedding hardship, codifying standards, and treating wealth as responsibility, not indulgence.

Not everyone will want this path. Most are content to remain bound to appetite and system. But if you desire sovereignty for your bloodline, the path toward Neo-Gentry and eventually a renewed Western aristocracy begins now. Every noble family that ever rose did so through heroism, discipline, and alliance, sometimes by victory on the battlefield, sometimes through commercial success, but always through the long cooperation of family across generations.

This is possible for you. Begin with what you can do in your own household. Build from there. Over time, your line can ascend. The work is difficult, but it is the only path to continuity. You can make this happen for your family.