If you’re busy, jump ahead

This article will be served as a two-course meal.

(1) First, it will make some sense of the current situation around ecological erosion, planetary regeneration, and an evolutionary understanding of money. This is done by what could be called ‘proleptic storytelling’.

That’s telling a story of the future where planetary regeneration has already happened, looking backwards through history to figure out how we got there.

(2) Talking of action, if you’re looking for the actionable part of the article, jump ahead to the subheadline »The right answer and a good story«.

We’ll discuss a sales letter that drew a historical response rate of 100%, and you’ll find tools for tweaking your message to compell potential investors and donors.

What do wealth holders need to say yes and fund your project?

That’s about half-way down.

Let’s start with a story told backwards.

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Fast forward one century

Imagine it’s 2124.

We’re needling a thread backwards through the last century …

… because we can.

We’re still here, and thriving on top.

We made it: We healed our home planet.

Sure, there are still some patches of Earth that need special care – you know, where we really messed up – but we reversed the larger trend of degeneration into regeneration.

Frankly, it wasn’t easy. It called us to recruit our intelligence, intuition and integrity, and it required an unprecedented level of trust and collaboration against dire odds.

A historical challenge of global ecological erosion prompted us to fundamentally rethink what we’re doing.

That included something that – despite being entirely imaginary – almost made us sacrifice everything that’s real:

Money.

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Civilizational circulation problems

At the cusp of the new millennium, money and planetary regeneration were ships in the night.

Sure, a handful of bright pioneers already got going. We saw that regeneration can happen quickly:

• The rewilding of landscapes was documented
• Proof of concept was delivered
• The possibility of regeneration was attested

And yes, some money was already moving toward regenerators.

But what was the bulk of the money doing?

It circulated rather pointlessly in the veins of a self-centered and globe-spanning superorganism, made of states, markets and institutions. Whenever a ‘need’ was identified (or invented), markets rushed to serve it … no matter how superficial or existentially irrelevant it was.

It was as if money was kept behind a dam.

It was held hostage to follow ‘market logic’ and fuel degenerative decadence, instead of being free to follow the ‘logic of life’ and spark a regenerative renaissance. As if it could go on forever, this self-centered superorganism didn’t have the eyes to see that it slowly degraded a biosphere with boundaries:

The very foundation of life was ignored, and the mirage created that this could be done without consequences catching up to us.

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»When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money.«

– Indian Proverb

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Now, looked at from above, there’s no doubt that money should be in service to life.

After all, what’s money worth if it’s not the driver of a healthy becoming story to a maturing species? Well, it wasn’t yet.

How did we get there?

Why didn’t we move earlier?

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Suddenly dangerous

We messed up, slowly.

The environmental damage that we saw?

Yeah, we did that against the regenerative impulse and creative upward drift that any truly alive ecosystem sports. We didn’t catch the moment when we actually managed to turn into a real threat to this massive planet …

… with significant buffer capacity against the messy learning curve of foolhardy naked apes.

Yes, we defeated the odds and wrestled even this originally antifragile system into submission.

The full story arc toward cascading biosphere erosion, then, looked something like this:

1. Originate: Too weak to beat the regenerative itch of natureFirst, we sustained a modest hunter-gatherer or farmer life and never even came close to exceed nature’s regenerative drive. Our numbers were low and our capacity to take was limited, just like the capacity of any other animal to wreck the planetary biosphere is just not there. That also begs the question: Which adorable critter would turn out an absolute ecosystem wrecker if it evolved enough?
2. Accelerate: Starting to pack a punchAs we industrialized our life, we first came to exceed the regenerative impulse of nature locally. That scarcely registered – degradation was still slow, quickly overgrown, and the Earth gigantic. We had disrupted only few ecosystems so completely that it became obvious. If we did, only few people saw it: Those who did it. They were also those that didn’t care. Anyway, when we returned a few years later, we found jungle again. Nature still had our back.
3. Degrade: Strong enough to wrestle nature into submissionFinally, we extracted resources that we then turned into elaborate machinery to extract more resources. We tried to find a chemical and pharmacological answer to everything and released environmental toxins on an unprecedented scale. Now, we overwhelmed natures regenerative capacity so massively that we saw a cascading deterioration of the biosphere. Historically, that was a new thing to deal with.

Frankly, it’s not such a big surprise that we struggled to get a hold of this.

Of course we did not immediately manage to redistribute resources toward regeneration. For people living out their life in the origination stage, degradation was a far-off fictional scenario.

For the inhabitants of the much shorter acceleration stage, it still wasn’t a today issue.

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»Humanity lives within two interlinked systems: the biosphere and global civilization. Together, they are the life support system for all humans. For the first time in history, the structure of our growing global civilization is undermining the integrity of the biosphere upon which it depends. We are crossing planetary boundaries of both extraction and pollution, threatening the ability of our civilizational system to continue.«

– Civilization Research Institute

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When we woke up in the midst of undeniable planetary degradation, we struggled to acknowledge the reality of our destructive potential …

…and the speed and momentum with which it unfolded.

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Imaginary limits to real reality

Some people were ready to act and throw their life at this challenge.

Their problem wasn’t perspective, purpose or passion, but pay. They faced a lack of liquidity to actually pursue a mission that transcended their selfish interest.

Silly them, they didn’t scan the market for artificial needs to serve instead, so … shit out of luck?

Now, the painful twist was that those pioneers had already succeeded in a way:

• All the knowledge we needed was right there and just had to be acted on
• Most solutions were already developed and just had to be implemented
• People were ready to find the rest through research & development

But all of them had to be enabled, and within the rules of the system that we cooked up, this enabling came with money.

Persistent human effort was governed by money, and if money wasn’t there to support it … it typically didn’t happen. True pioneers weren’t always free to throw their life at regenerative and evolutionary quests.

Actually, very rarely were they truly free to do so.

This somewhat lengthy quote captures the situation back in 2024:

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»There is a moderately-sized, international meta-network of intelligent, motivated, multipotentialites (i.e. adaptive, self-aware people with multiple strong talents) who are putting a career’s worth of time, energy, heart, creativity & cognitive effort into learning, processing, and generating the cultural materials and biopsychosocial capacities that are needed for regenerative social transformation, depth philosophy, Big Picture sensemaking, participatory collective intelligence, transdisciplinary emergent sciences, building intentional communities, advancing full-spectrum well-being & unfolding integrative, transperspectival postpostmodern solutions in all areas of life.

Almost all of them are living with financial insecurity.

That means that they lack the social clout that accompanies wealth. Many are on the edge of poverty. Often they cannot afford homes, families, or social experiments to test their insights. And in countries like the United States, many of them may be bankrupted by healthcare bills, student debts, etc.

If we accept (and we don’t have to) that these people are plausibly connected to urgent questions of social transformation and personal growth for human beings then they need to be materially stabilized.

They need to be able to live, work & breed. They need to have their hearts and brains liberated from the constant distraction of material worry.«

– Layman Pascal in an article on the ‘Metamodern Business Bureau’

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For the missions that really counted, money was scarce … and few understood the real ‘return on investment’ that was in reach.

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The ridiculous return of regeneration

So what was it that was missing a century ago?

The collective recognition that we largely turned real wealth into imaginary wealth.

As soon as we came to see this, we slowly started to reverse it. We became aware that we could spend money on regeneration, and turn made-up wealth back into real wealth. And it was an incredible deal:

Only a fraction of what had been extracted was now needed to fix the damage done.

Since we did all the damage against the (re)generative upward drift of nature, we felt a tailwind as soon as we aligned with it.

The narrow market logic of net degenerative economics couldn’t process the relevance of planetary regeneration. Economic activity was somehow assumed to be magically separate from the biosphere it happened within.

But take a single glance at planetary regeneration through a more systemic and holistic lens … and you’ll find that nothing else has a comparable ‘return on investment’.

We had to apply the principle of reciprocity to the vital systems we depended on.

But the fact that regeneration was clearly an idea whose time had come … didn’t automatically mean that people got the memo or checked the clock.

Apart from evolutionary roadblocks like greedy corporates, corrupt politics, and inert bureaucracies, one major jam was this:

Those who knew the right answer didn’t always tell a good story.

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And here’s where we turn actionable →

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The right answer and a good story

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What do investors need to know about a mission to fund it?

Brandon Nørgaard already did a way better job than I could do at thinking this through on a project and ‘hard data’ level.

Among others, it’s:

• Business plan (& proof of concept)
• Transparency & accountability (managing the money received)
• Quantification of impact (think soil analysis and biodiversity tracking to prove the efficacy of regenerative efforts)
• Management (organizational structure & timelines)

It’s the truth of a project, the right answer.

This article has limits, so let’s confidently assume that’s covered:

What’s left over?

It’s whether a good story is told about this right answer. Whether the investor’s minds are properly understood and addressed. Now, marketing has understood most minds and their motivations.

There’s a subset of probably unique minds, judged from their rather unique results:

Rich folks.

Let’s talk about them, and how to address a millionaire mind.

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A fabled sales letter

There’s a historic example of copywriting excellence:

A call for funding that had a 100% response rate.

About a century ago, twenty-four high net-worth individuals were addressed by Bruce Barton to fund the education of a handful of high-potentials. He set a frame and gave context, carved out some details to made it visceral, and called to leave a legacy in the most compelling way.

He told a really good story – and had flawless success with it. It’s remarkable that of all sales letters, what scored a historical response rate was the one that didn’t deliver anything material or ‘selfish' upon payment.

If you’re curious, here’s an opportunity to read it (bottom left) – highly recommended, it’s finest psychology.

It seems outstandingly relevant for the quest today.

It yielded results that prompted me to dig deeper into the topic of high net-worth psychology.

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High-networth psychology – apply to fund your project

Before we go, let me say this:

When you’re addressing high net-worth individuals, apply a sense of measure.

They’re likely quicker to move into psychological reactance when feeling played and manipulated. In order to get to where they are, they had to see through bullshit for a lifetime. Make it attractive to follow your recommendation in order to stay consistent with their sense of self, and not to keep it intact by discarding your offer …

… all because you went too far and went impertinent.

In the following paragraphs, I will make multiple references to an open access paper titled Natural philanthropy: a new evolutionary framework explaining diverse experimental results and informing fundraising practice.

The author, Russell James:

• Drew insights from an array of papers on evolutionary altruism
• Applied these to modern day philanthropy
• Distilled advice on how communicate with potential donors

Really bright work.

Now that that’s settled, let’s talk about three drivers of philanthropy, and four tools to enable it.

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Three drivers of philanthropy

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1. Legacy

The prime motivator here is to (1) leave a legacy.

Whatever amount of wealth we accumulate in this lifetime, there’s a knowing that it doesn’t matter unless it moves something in the real world. And not just today, but after we’re gone.

Legacy is the umbrella concept that we’re working with here, and it’s why Bruce Barton made it his dominant psychological lever.

Count on high net-worth peeps to want to leave one, just like everyone else does. We all would probably prefer for our name to live on after our death. This is what the Pulitzer Prize winning book The Denial Of Death by Ernest Becker dug into:

The survival of the conceptual self when our physical self has long left.

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»… in order to compensate for our fear of the inevitable loss of our physical self, we try to construct a conceptual self that will live forever.

This is why people try SO hard to put their names on buildings, on statues, on spines of books. It's why we feel compelled to spend so much time giving ourselves to others, especially to children, in the hopes that our influence – our conceptual self – will last way beyond our physical self. That we will be remembered and revered and idolized long after our physical self ceases to exist.

Becker called such efforts our "immortality projects," projects that allow our conceptual self to live on way past the point of our physical death.

All of human civilization, he says, is basically a result of immortality projects: the cities and governments and structures and authorities in place today were all immortality projects of men and women who came before us. They are the remnants of conceptual selves that ceased to die. Names like Jesus, Muhammad, Napoleon, and Shakespeare are just as powerful today as when those men lived, if not more so. And that's the whole point.

Whether it be through mastering an art form, conquering a new land, gaining great riches, or simply having a large and loving family that will live on for generations, all the meaning in our life is shaped by this innate desire to never truly die.«

– From The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck by Mark Manson

Swallow your ego … and stroke theirs a bit.

Help their conceptual self persist through the ages ahead, resisting the sands of time.

The Natural Philanthropy paper calls this ‘advancing the hero donor story’. Talk ‘in terms of other people’s interest’, and accept a bunch of selfish drivers to our actions. It’s natural, and it’s not ‘bad’ – when balanced.

Actually, if it helps you … to leave a legacy is an interesting mix of self-interest and transpersonal motivations:

No real legacy can be left unless other lives are touched.

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2. Judgment

The self-image of most high net-worth folks probably has a shade of elitism, however subtly and gracefully that’s expressed.

Accordingly, they want to be seen making (2) quality decisions with good judgment.

How well does it work to build elaborate economics on a brittle ecological foundation?

Is that good judgment? To not be able to think beyond one’s own navel? To not grasp the situation of a planet in a historically unique transition … that’s the height of your elite understanding?

Our longing to showcase good judgment is where you can introduce some challenging elements into the legacy notion:

You’re smart? Prove it.

Can you see the world for what it is?

Are you capable of thinking beyond immediate reward?

Chances are … they are.

And they pride themselves in it. It’s probably what lead to their wealth, so give an opportunity to apply this admirable trait more holistically.

Let people spearhead the emergence of planetary consciousness with good judgment.

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3. Generosity

There are very pragmatic reasons to think beyond oneself and let (3) generosity and transpersonal motivations guide our actions.

How do you feel when you’ve reached everything you worked towards …

… and suddenly multiple yachts and jacuzzis turn out disenchanting?

They’re so much less thrilling to possess than you hoped. This was supposed to feel great, where did the magic go? I can only steer one yacht at a time, so … what now?

There are mounting reports of seriously wealthy people that turned existentially flustered when they didn’t feel any difference after reaching their most outrageous goals, and now look to find what they’ve been promised:

A sense of inner fulfillment.

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»I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer.«

– Jim Carrey

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This points to a saving grace nested into our psyche.

As we look to feel better ourselves, we’re bound to at some point open ourselves up toward the world: How can we help?

This built-in psychological mechanism jumps to our rescue today, where we existentially depend on wealth holders to allow for regenerative potential trickle back into the whole …

… and to enjoy it while doing so.

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Four tools to make it real

4. Tangibility

This boils down to what you’ve surely heard before: Tell a story.

Make it something that can be pictured, imagined, remembered. There are three rules here, and they’re all inspired by the Natural Philanthropy paper:

1. Use the identifiable victim effect to your advantage
   ‍We all struggle to wrap our head around things that break the scale of daily life. When we’re talking about billions of people and light years of space travel … most people tune out. If you can instead make it about Lea, a single human, that needs a good education to not bury her potential alive … then we can use the neural pathways we’ve built and refined for millions of years to understand exactly how we can help.
2. If you can’t identify an individual, find a unit
   ‍If you don’t have a single human being to identify, see if you can find a way to frame the beneficiaries as a coherent unit. Think a family, or a herd, or a landscape that you can put a name on. I remember a story of sudden funding success as soon as a random conglomerate of landscapes East of Silicon Valley had been lumped together and labeled Mount Hamilton Wilderness. (from the book Made To Stick)
3. Connect funding to immediate impact
   ‍Alright, we’re all aware that the organization around funding and philanthropy creates overhead, but that’s not what we want to fund … while others helped Lea’s education, or the Mount Hamilton Wilderness to bounce back. As they go about their days and strike a challenging one, funders might at times want to remember and visualize the change they’ve made in the world. You know, to keep going with some bounce in their step. That’s harder to do if you helped a foundation keep up with its monthly SaaS bill.

Find things that can be tied to the conceptual self and help it survive. It’s what Bruce Barton did when he won over a whole 100% of people he reached out to.

Then, when people want to jump on board, create a particular feeling …

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5. Intimacy

Everyone wants their money.

Not everyone dares to build a relationship to them and meet at eye level.

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»[Establish] an intuitive contrast with a purely conditional market–exchange relationship. Thus, charity actions emphasizing unconditional social support (providing a small gift reflecting a deep understanding of the donor’s preferences, demonstrating empathy during a crisis, expressing gratitude for the relationship) will advance the goal, while those emphasizing a purely conditional transactional relationship (caring only about the donor’s money) may not.

In addition, the charity can become like family by encouraging social interaction and mutual support among donors, thus building a community analogous to an extended family.«

– From the Natural Philanthropy paper

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This sparks the association to the heart-resonance approach to philanthropy as I got to know it through the work of Bret Warshawski and Bart Hoorweg.

To deliver hard data, proof of concept and clean accounting is one part of building trust. The other is to spark some personal resonance on the back of a shared purpose and love for what’s next.

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6. Affordability

This might be harder to do and required some insight into the donor’s life, but if you can …

… time your requests for funding and donations.

If there’s a financial windfall in their life, it’s much easier to give lightly and readily.

Beyond, the paper recommends to ask for a gift from assets rather than from income, since the share it makes up is probably much smaller in assets compared to income.

This helps to reduce the perception of loss, and rather focus on the joy of giving.

The author continues:

»Other examples that reduce the perception of loss might include asking for a future commitment, rather than an immediate payment, or breaking a larger gift amount into a smaller daily equivalent (for the price of a cup of coffee a day).«

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7. Immediacy

An eternal topic of the human story arc:

Good intention, quick lip service … sluggish action.

That applies to potential funders and investors just as much, so you have to ‘manage decision avoidance’, as the Natural Philanthropy paper puts it.

When you’re asking a potential donor for a contribution, there are three options:

• They agree and contribute
• They refuse and don’t contribute
• They avoid making the decision

The last one happens recurringly, because it ‘involves no initial cost but may have fewer negative consequences than a blatant refusal’, such as violating a code of behaviour with social consequences.

As such, it might be an attractive road to take. You know, to ‘keep your options open’, only to have the commitment fizzle out into non-action … that can be easily excused by forgetting. All you have to do is to ‘miss’ the reminder in the mail.

You can avoid this pattern from playing out by making the decision something to be taken immediately.

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Good, smart, and remembered

Let’s wrap up:

Help rich folks etch their name into the fabric of the cosmos by leaving a legacy (1), and help them be smart (2) and good (3), all by making:

• The funding case tangible (4)
• The donor relationship intimate (5)
• The decision to give affordable (6) and immediate (7)

It’s not a manipulative illusion you’re weaving.

At this moment in history, people with command over outstanding wealth qualify for uniquely impactful contributions to a transition of historical proportions.

The change ahead is one that we only have to make once. We’re butting against global biosphere boundaries that are either respected, or violated with dire consequences. The Great Wealth Transfer might be the very thing that allows for money to move into the hands of a generation who grew up with an entirely different understanding of the world:

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»Younger generation wealth holders (Gen Z, Millenials and women of wealth) are increasingly seeking to align their wealth with their values.«

– From the Philanthropy Impact magazine, Issue 29, 2023 (link broke while working on it, will update when I can)

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Genuine philanthropy can be the crowning achievement of a wildly successful life, allowing today’s holders of wealth to advance the human journey with an impact size that many people can’t muster.

A later quote from the same issue says that »many wealthy clients are horrified by the environmental crisis, and want their wealth to join the arsenal of forces addressing it.«

Help them.

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Not yet everyone on board, or in reach

Others might be wrapped up in their own world, lack some perspective and context.

If that’s the case, help them see what you see. However this topic might seem to you personally, not everyone’s following – like advisors to wealthy folks:

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»This mag [Philanthropy Impact magazine] talks about ‘New Philanthropy’: Donors want system change. They are not getting ‘service’ on this from established advisors who are clueless. $100tn (yes, right) transferring from Millennials to boomers over next decade.«

– Rob Pye, in my DMs when asked about his work and further insights

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If already aware, they might still be looking for projects that qualify … not just having the right answer, but telling a good story about it.

Whatever the case, don’t let simple psychology be the limiting factor to the flow of world-shaping streams of action-prompting money.

But take care at conquering one last hurdle, which is getting in touch at all.

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»They are overwhelmed with people asking them for money so they have built protective barriers - it’s hard to get to them. To have success in getting this kind of funding I think requires two things - first to get in front of them (a big challenge), and, second, a compelling story and explanation of why our proposal is worth funding.

I think legacy is a big part of it.

These people want to know that their lives and their wealth created long-lasting good in the world. And since we are a critical turning point in the history of our species, this can be a big selling point – to be part of the transition to a new civilization, to be remembered as the ones who ‘saved’ humanity from self-destruction.

Can’t think of a bigger and better legacy.«

– Roger Briggs, author of Emerging World

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This is high-stakes stuff, and there’s the inevitable portion of doubt whether we’ll conquer this challenge in adequate time.

I’ll acknowledge that.

Now that that’s done:

What if a flood of regenerative funding is what happens next?

What if we actually get it right?