Syneidesis doll
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</font><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://qz.com/844487/meet-the-leader-of-a-billionaires-club-determined-to-stop-trump-from-destroying-the-world/" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">https://qz.com/844487/meet-the-leader-of-a-billionaires-club-determined-to-stop-trump-from-destroying-the-world/</a></font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">...</font></div><div><p style="text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 0px; padding: 16px 0px; border: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 30px; vertical-align: baseline; position: relative; transition: background 0.5s ease 0s;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">little over five months since those placid days aboard the Sanssouci Star, and 11 weeks after the election, Doll remains unsettled by the outcome, in particular the righteous ire behind it—over what can fairly be observed as a personal attack. If you care to be blunt, Trump’s election was, by extension, validation of a war against his club and its members—internationalists who scoff at borders and nationalities, and see only deals to be done wherever they may be. When Trump <a href="http://www.npr.org/2016/10/13/497857068/transcript-donald-trumps-speech-responding-to-assault-accusations" style="text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none; cursor: pointer;">railed against</a> “radical globalization and the disenfranchisement of working people,” he was assaulting the 1%. “You could say these people are at <em style="text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">fault </em>for globalization—they <em style="text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">are</em> the 1%,” Doll told me.</font></p><p style="text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 0px; padding: 16px 0px; border: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 30px; vertical-align: baseline; position: relative; transition: background 0.5s ease 0s;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A long, wiry man with a gravely voice and a penchant for hugging his clients, often while also capturing the moment with a selfie,<b> Doll calls his club Syneidesis, which in ancient Greek means conscience. He started it four years ago</b>, and is now wrestling with what comes next.</font></p><p style="text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 0px; padding: 16px 0px; border: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 30px; vertical-align: baseline; position: relative; transition: background 0.5s ease 0s;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">For starters, there is the question whether Trump’s accusations are legitimate. <em style="text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Is</em> globalization truly to blame for the ills that he decried during the election? Doll doesn’t think so, even if saying so looks self-serving. The economic system is imperfect to be sure. The election dramatized what had been obscured, which is that large numbers of Americans have been excluded from the fruits of more open trade and borders. But Doll still sees something principled about the free movement of products, ideas and capital, with the reward of wealth going to the equity owners of enterprise. His members are not morally depraved for fighting climate change, for example, as Trump has seemed to suggest.</font></p><p style="text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 0px; padding: 16px 0px; border: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 30px; vertical-align: baseline; position: relative; transition: background 0.5s ease 0s;"><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">img]</font></b></p><figure id="image-880716" class="progressive-image inline-image aligncenter zoomable size-medium is-loaded animation-complete" style="text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 0px 0px 25px; padding: 26px 0px 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; width: 640px; position: relative; max-width: 640px;"><figcaption class="inline-image-caption" style="text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 0px auto; padding: 22px 0px 20px 27px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 20px; vertical-align: baseline; position: absolute; box-sizing: border-box; left: -300px; top: 20px; width: 240px;"><i class="icon-camera" style="text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 20px; vertical-align: baseline; position: absolute; top: calc(31px); left: 0px; transform: translateY(-50%);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Syneidesis, gathering at London’s Dorchester, 2015.<span class="inline-image-credit has-space" style="text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline;"> (Courtesy of William Doll)</span></font></i></figcaption></figure><p style="text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 0px; padding: 16px 0px; border: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 30px; vertical-align: baseline; position: relative; transition: background 0.5s ease 0s;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">That has led Doll to a personal decision: As of now, Syneidesis (pronounced sin-EYE’-deh-siss) has been solely a rich-person’s preserve. But what if Doll explicitly identifies it as something more—</font><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">as a vehicle for thwarting the dismantlement of the fabric of global economics and politics?</font><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> Syneidesis can be a club for “conscientious investors,” Doll said, billionaires who not only seek company with other billionaires and to make more money—as his members currently do—but also to save the now-vilified construct known only by its abstract names, globalization and the “liberal world order.” “I can’t just stay on the sidelines,” Doll said. “We can be an investor group geared toward spreading this right kind of capitalism and globalization.”</font></p><p style="text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 0px; padding: 16px 0px; border: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 30px; vertical-align: baseline; position: relative; transition: background 0.5s ease 0s;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Before he was catering to the ultra-wealthy, Doll, at the time wearing long hair and a long beard, edited documentaries. Since that did not pay the bills, he found a job organizing industry conventions, which is what he was doing when an acquaintance floated the idea of holding small, Davos-style art, geopolitics and business gatherings for well-to-do but somewhat isolated friends. Doll, who speaks German and Russian and is married to a Russian woman, possessed the personal raw material to mix with global plutocrats. Syneidesis was born.</font></p><p style="text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 0px; padding: 16px 0px; border: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 30px; vertical-align: baseline; position: relative; transition: background 0.5s ease 0s;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Today it has a dozen core members in Europe, the Middle East and North America, each paying a $30,000 to $50,000-a-year fee, plus a small cut for deals closed through a Syneidesis relationship.</font></p><p style="text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 0px; padding: 16px 0px; border: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 30px; vertical-align: baseline; position: relative; transition: background 0.5s ease 0s;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Technically speaking, the bar for joining Syneidesis is steep—$1 billion or more in assets, including $100 million in liquid cash. There is a larger pool of such individuals than one might think if those are your bylaws—as of January 2016, Forbes counted 1,810 billionaires on the planet. And that is a selling point, because for such people, the brotherhood of one’s own kind is the essential elixir. Syneidesis’ other main attraction is a promised exposure to business deals available nowhere else, exclusive opportunities with a better than average chance of a bonanza. That is the reason for the large cash requirement: To attract entrepreneurs willing to grant Syneidesis first crack, Doll’s members must be prepared to play big, and to lose or win with the same geniality.</font></p><p style="text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 0px; padding: 16px 0px; border: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 30px; vertical-align: baseline; position: relative; transition: background 0.5s ease 0s;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Yet Doll’s rules are calculatingly flexible. One of his tightest members, for instance, is </font><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Carl Page, an idiosyncratic Silicon Valley technologist with a wicked sense of humor, and his charming and intense environmentalist wife, Barbara. Although he earned tens of millions of dollars creating and selling tech companies in the 1990s, Page is worth less than a billion dollars. But his other cachet is that he is the older brother of Larry Page, the Google co-founder. </font><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">At a Syneidesis dinner at Carl’s Palo Alto house one year, Chicago investment tycoon Steve Stevanovich was surprised when Larry Page showed up, and in a surprising way. “You imagine him arriving in a helicopter or a limo,” Stevanovich told me over lunch, “but you don’t think of Larry Page arriving on a bicycle.”</font></p><p style="text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 0px; padding: 16px 0px; border: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 30px; vertical-align: baseline; position: relative; transition: background 0.5s ease 0s;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Then there is Peter Littlewood, the British-born director of Argonne, the Chicago-based US federal laboratory.</b> Littlewood is also not a billionaire, nor in possession of big ready cash. But he is a priceless Syneidesis member, speaking with the easy, polished charm of a diplomat, and the quiet authority of a former director of England’s legendary Cavendish Laboratory and, before that, the theoretical physics department at Bell Labs. Most important, Littlewood is the doorkeeper to among the most valuable future Syneidesis investments—the inventions at Argonne, fundamental advances in nano-technology, big data, battery science and more. Syneidesis members see the potential for serious investment at Argonne.</font></p><p style="text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 0px; padding: 16px 0px; border: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 30px; vertical-align: baseline; position: relative; transition: background 0.5s ease 0s;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">As it happens, Doll has not been alone in pondering the substantial wealth that might be mobilized to create a sanctuary for globalization—to salvage the very ecosystem that has nurtured the biggest fortunes in history. Among those on a similar track is billionaire Bill Gates.</font></p><p style="text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 0px; padding: 16px 0px; border: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 30px; vertical-align: baseline; position: relative; transition: background 0.5s ease 0s;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But the odds against them are exceptionally high, in part because they appear to be going up against not just Trump and the architects of Brexit, but a much stronger, fundamental force—the historical cycle.</font></p><h2 style="text-size-adjust: auto; margin: 19px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-weight: normal; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 32px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">We forgot the victims of globalization could vote</font></h2></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">...</font><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">That question has vexed historians, politicians, pundits, journalists, and a lot of other people—including Doll’s club members. So far, in terms of explaining the phenomenon of Trump’s victory, the expert consensus has cited a recipe of wealth inequality, a popular unease with migrants, a dash of lostness in society, and a sprinkling of bigotry and sexism. For one or more of these reasons, experts say, some 63 million Americans dispensed with their observed behavior over decades, and, in a determined pique of anti-establishment rage, elected the brusque real estate tycoon. They have ascribed the same combination to the June 2016 victory of Brexit. But are they right?</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">They are, in the way that a soup has many ingredients. But the nagging feeling is that the picture is incomplete—that we have all ingredients and only a thin gruel for our trouble. For starters, none of the purported reasons for the wave of uprisings is new—inequality, disorientation and a suspicion of outsiders have been with us for some time. Nor for that matter are ambitious, big-talking, kumbaya-promising, hate-bating populists anything special—they have been factors since Moses and probably before.</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">What the analyses are missing are time and context—the social physics: The stark possibility that the above ingredients contributed to the anti-establishment wave, but that their potency has been amplified by the turn of a historical cycle.</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"> </font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Ever since George Washington, government has swung between liberal and conservative.</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"> </font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">For decades, scholars have discerned patterns in the long arc of events. Big, sprawling history appears to move in cycles, at turns reinforcing and at others annihilating the existing way. Brexit and Trump make sense if you know that, over time, seemingly immutable norms and institutions have routinely proven to be in fact unfixed. Seemingly unassailable rulers, businesses, nations and whole civilizations have at once vanished, and so have the eras in which they thrived. What triggers the rise and fall of epochs—what drives the cycles—is probably unknowable, except for the complicity of humans themselves, with their unpredictable triumphs and blunders. But scholars have attempted to document the shape and character of the cycles.</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Go back in US history: Ever since George Washington, government has swung between liberal and conservative. This is true for all 45 presidents, according to Yale professor Stephen Skowronek, a leading theorist on political cycles. Some scholars say the liberal-to-conservative-to-liberal epochs have happened at more or less predictable, 16-year intervals. Others say they have been longer, and have less resembled circular-shaped cycles than zigs, zags and spirals. Whatever the case, as an organizing principle, epochs impose order on an otherwise chaotic world. You can start to see human events much more clearly if you group them first.</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">So if the story of 2016 is one of a cycle turning—which seems to be the case—it’s understandable that scholars, journalists and other observers have been rushing to give the doomed epoch a name. Figuring out what precise cycle has ended has proved to be much harder than it seems it should be, but doing so is crucial if you care about what comes next—and especially if, like Doll, you need to know just what you may already be in battle against.</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">If what’s over is supreme American global power, for example, that means we are observing the end of the post-Soviet era, meaning a cycle lasting roughly from the end of 1991 through now; it suggests that we are entering a period shaped by dispersed global power. But if it’s the liberal world order that’s ending, that suggests an epoch beginning right after World War II, a roughly 70-year cycle, and the actual disintegration of the global system as we know it.</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The answer depends on whom you ask. According to Columbia University professor Mark Lilla, we are watching the dying throes of the Sixties and the advent of identity politics. Walter Russell Mead says Americans have simply reverted to their Andrew Jacksonian roots, returning to the persnickety politics of 1820s nationalist self-reliance.</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Francis Fukuyama, a Stanford professor, conceived the most famous cyclical descriptor for modern geopolitics, calling it “the end of history.” He thought a cycle ended with the Soviet collapse, and that another began—the demise of closed societies championed by Moscow, and the triumph of US-led free trade, more or less open borders, and democratic, honestly contested elections.</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"> </font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“If men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because the just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause.”</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"> </font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Today’s upheaval and president Vladimir Putin’s reassertion of Russian power say something different: that the Soviet collapse was a historic turn, but less definitive than Fukuyama had proposed. To grapple with the current zeitgeist, you have to go back further, he now says—to the late 1940s and 1950s and the Marshall Plan, US president Harry Truman’s blueprint to rebuild Europe and, with a host of financial and military institutions, resist the spread of Soviet communism into Europe.</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">It is the US-led world order, established during those eventful years, that is under siege. “The US was determined to buttress an internationalist elite after the war that would stand up to authoritarian pressures on the left and the right,” said Benn Steil, chief economist at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of a forthcoming book on the Marshall Plan.</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Even as he was writing his famous tract almost three decades ago, Fukuyama seemed to anticipate today’s events. People would tire of peace and prosperity, he said, and destroy it. “If men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because the just cause was victorious in an earlier generation,” he said, “then they will struggle against the just cause.”</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“The real question should not have been why populism has emerged in 2016,” Fukuyama wrote after Trump’s election, “but why it took so long to become manifest.”</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The leaders of this movement describe their rise in words reminiscent of physics. “We are experiencing the end of one world and the birth of another. We are experiencing the return of nation-states,” French politician Marine Le Pen said at a Jan. 21 gathering of far-right parties in the German city of Koblenz. The previous day, in his inauguration address, Trump himself drew an explicit line between his presidency and everything that went before it, calling it the result of “a historic movement, the likes of which the world has never seen before.”</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"> </font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“The liberal world order’s days are numbered.”</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"> </font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">How will the cycle play out? If Le Pen wins the French presidential elections this year and Angela Merkel is defeated in Germany, analysts foresee the demise of an experiment in defusing nationalism and uniting former wartime adversaries. Even if Le Pen loses, her adversary, François Fillon, is also in some ways in Trump’s mold, vowing to “break down the house,” and, like Le Pen, likely to cozy up to Putin. “The liberal world order’s days are numbered,” said Mathew Burrows, former counselor to the US National Intelligence Council, which synthesizes the work of the 17 intelligence agencies.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></font></div>