If you’ve spent any amount of time in a TCFP catch-up, you’ll know it doesn’t take long before the conversation veers from ISAs and investment frameworks into the high-brow realms of Aristotle, Machiavelli, and whatever philosophy book someone claims to be half-way through. Some teams analyse fund flows; we diagnose the human condition. It’s all part of the service.
Recently, we found ourselves laughing about that old (and wrongly attributed) “Aristotle quote” where the youth are accused of being rude, feckless, impulsive, and incapable of respecting their elders. Scholars point out Aristotle never actually wrote those lines - but he did say, in the Rhetoric, that young people are passionate, prone to following impulses, and inclined to believe in ideals before practicality. In other words, exactly what every older generation says about the younger one… and has been saying for 2,400 years.
But the more interesting connection came when we layered this with a passage from Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince:
“There is nothing more difficult, more dangerous, or more uncertain in its success
than to introduce a new order of things.
Those who flourished under the old oppose it,
and those who might benefit under the new defend it only lukewarmly…”
If Aristotle gives us the timeless complaint about youth, Machiavelli gives us the timeless explanation: systems don’t like change, and people don’t trust what hasn’t yet been proven.
The young are criticised for their impatience.
But that impatience is precisely what forces new possibilities into the world.
The old guard resist because the existing system suits them.
The potential winners of the new system hesitate because hope is less tangible than habit.
And in the middle sits anyone trying to lead change - in business, in finance, in policy, or in their own lives - discovering the uncomfortable truth Machiavelli warned about: innovation is messy, unpopular, and only obvious in hindsight.
At TCFP, we see this play out constantly:
- clients transitioning from accumulation to decumulation
- families shifting from control to stewardship
- advisers rethinking what “value” means in a world where 90% of technical queries can be answered by a well-trained machine
- and yes, an industry wrestling with new models of delivery, transparency, and human-centred advice (money, made human).
So perhaps the youth aren’t the problem.
Perhaps their unruly energy is exactly what keeps the world from grinding to a halt.
And perhaps those who push for change - whether they are young or simply “young-minded” - deserve a bit more credit. They carry the burden Machiavelli described: facing resistance from the beneficiaries of the past, and skepticism from the beneficiaries of the future.
It’s a hard place to stand.
But it’s where progress begins.
Which is probably why we keep ending up debating Machiavelli in TCFP catch-ups.
Sometimes you need a Renaissance political theorist to explain the dynamics of the modern advice business.