If any general insight undergirds these transmissions it is that in real ways a country or an institution or a neighborhood is the same as a family. The same principles of gardened ecology that sustain the one sustain the others. Insights garnered at one level apply up and down the scale.
So in today’s potpourri we are going to discover what fathers and mothers and CEO’s can learn from Cyrus the Great and from courtship. We will conclude with some insights into the extremely neglected level of organization that we call the neighborhood or the community.
Cyrus the Great
We will start with John Psmith’s review of the Cyropaedia. No one can say for sure if Cyrus was actually educated the way Xenophon says, but at minimum we are getting Xenophon’s ideas on a good education. Likely what he has to say has some connection with the way Cyrus was raised.
The Psmith review does a great job of getting down to the salient points.
We will discuss some here, but by far the best use of your time would be to read the review while trying to connect the points to your family project or the group you lead or are creating.
Cyrus, along with the other Persian boys of his social class, is being trained to lead. And so their education is centered around having lots of opportunities to judge, instruct, and coerce others; but also opportunities to serve and obey.
There’s a fallacy often made by people not in the business world, where they assume that because the owner of a small company and a middle manager in a large one might command a similar number of people, that they therefore have anything at all in common. . . In fact, the owner of a 10,000-person company has more in common with the owner of a 10-person company than he does with the vice president of a 100,000-person company with 10,000 people under him.
A multi-generation family is a family where your children are being raised to be your successors in leading a family. This is the correct mindset to have, and almost everything else flows from it. If you get nothing else from today’s transmission, get the mindset. Would you say your children have opportunities to judge, instruct, and coerce and to serve and obey?
You are raising successors
They study in classrooms, receive military training, and shadow the magistrates in their official duties
In the early days of the Roman Republic, patricians educated their sons by having their sons follow them around all day. That was it.
Does your style of life allow your children to see you running the household? WE encourage engaging in some level of household production because it is something the children can participate with you in. Pick something. Chickens, canning, fixing the car, home repairs, heating with wood, it doesn’t matter, but pick it and do it and have your kids see you do it as they participate in it. Other activities like managing investments or paying bills will be harder to get the children involved in, but you should at least try.
but all of these official lessons are just the backdrop against which the real lessons are taking place. The boys have missions to accomplish, missions which they cannot possibly accomplish individually. So they have to learn to put together a team, to apportion responsibilities, and to judge merit in the aftermath. Anytime one of the boys commits an infraction, the adults ensure that he is judged by the others. All of this is carefully monitored, and boys who show partiality or favoritism, or who simply judge poorly, are savagely punished.
Giving your children individual responsibility is great. Giving them group responsibility is frightening. It’s frightening because they can and will fail. That’s also why its important. Have you heard of the Peter Principle, that people rise in a hierarchy to the level of their incompetence? This is true of most organizations because most organizations do not meaningfully let lower-level leaders have full responsibility. The only way not to get stuck in incompetence is to experience incompetence from the start and grow through it.
Two last insights:
Cyrus and his father Cambyses ride together towards the border of Persia. Cambyses adds one extra super-secret leadership tip: just be great. Be the best at what you do. In Cyrus’s case, this means tactics, logistics, personnel selection, drill, all the unglamorous parts of running an ancient army.
How many organizations take their members membership for granted? How many families take their kids’ respect and love as a given? Or else think its something you get through bribes? You must impress the people you lead, and you have to do it by being impressive.
Have you impressed your children yet today?
Care about their welfare
Is it rewarding to be part of your family? Does it feel like a lucky break to the people you lead that they are your employee, subordinate, follower, colleague?
The most rewarding thing someone can experience is feeling themselves become greater and more capable, so in a sense the lessons from Cyrus come full circle. Your children are most likely to believe you are a fantastic parent if they feel that you are prepping them to be a fantastic parent.
There’s much more at the link, including the best parts. CEOs in particular will want to read the part about being the best at what you do.
Courtship
The wonderful Build the Village substack took a close look at Young Adults and Dating recently.
Courtship is the most broken part of the generational stack. Raising good children that want to have children is easy. Getting them married to someone like-minded and capable isn’t. You only get to raise to your kids.
This is the fundamental problem that Build the Village identifies. Our children have trouble because we as adults have trouble. They are alone because we are alone. How can they find thick ties outside their birth family when we don’t have any?
A fundamental aspect of the problem, whether it’s about church, or boys thriving or now dating, has nothing to do with the teenagers themselves but with the parents. Parents who are alienated from other parents; and so, alone and fractured, they can’t offer the rising generation any coherent alternatives to the ever changing, emotionally distressing and increasingly difficult dating scene.
He suggests a two-part solution. Instead of cutting straight to some new dating or courtship plan, he suggests forming the adult community first, and then coming up with dating or courtship encouragement that fits within the community.
Building the Community
So how to build the community? Most efforts suffer from the same problems that most families and most corporations do: they don’t have a felt sense of shared purpose or shared work. Your neighborhood is just people who live by each other because your neighborhood doesn’t have produce goods or culture together. Even like-minded folks that move near each other are just affinities, not partners in a shared goal.
We envision communities that engage in production together: shared cows, shared neighborhood homeschooling coops, shared workshops, even ultimately shared businesses. Remote workers could be the vanguard of a new mode of community.
This kind of joint production doesn’t even require living together. Imagine a central farm where the families come together a few weeks every year for planting and harvesting.
Along those lines we would like to highlight an interesting project.
The New Founding organization is at the early stages of trying to put together a planned town like that. We believe that they are going to learn some important things and accomplish something great. Check out their Highland Project.
For prior non-stupid attempts to do the same, we point you (and the New Founding folks) to Paul Wheaton’s Permaculture Thorns.
"A multi-generation family is a family where your children are being raised to be your successors in leading a family."
How everything would change if we were converted to this idea. Raising little leaders for the next generation of OUR family and OUR community. Ownership of past, present and future. Great stuff! I'm going to link back to the Steader soon.