Daniel Lurie (b. February 4, 1977) takes a salary of one dollar to run San Francisco. He could take the full mayor’s pay. He does not need it, and he wants the city to see that he does not need it. The dollar is the gesture. It says the work is not for money. It says the man does the work for something the money cannot buy.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued in The Denial of Death that a man builds his life as a defense against two terrors. The first is the body that dies. The second runs deeper and resists naming: the fear that the life counts for nothing, that a man passes through and leaves no mark, that the universe does not register him. Becker called the project a man raises against these terrors a hero system. The hero system tells a man what counts as a life well spent. It hands him a script and promises that if he plays the part he outlasts his own death, in memory, in works, in the city he leaves behind.
For the heir the second terror takes a particular shape. Lurie inherits a fortune he did not make. His stepfather Peter E. Haas (1918-2005) ran Levi Strauss. His mother Mimi Haas (b. 1946) holds the stock and the standing. The money arrives before the man does anything. So the dread that visits the heir is not poverty. He suspects he is a name and a checkbook and nothing else, that someone handed him a life and he never earned one. Susie Buell, a Democratic donor who backed London Breed (b. 1974), said as much during the campaign. It doesn’t feel like you earned it when you buy it. That sentence names the heir’s worm at the core. I was given everything, so I am nothing.
Becker borrowed a phrase for the answer the heir reaches for. Causa sui. The cause of oneself. The wish to be one’s own father, to author one’s own worth, to stand as a self-made man rather than a made one. Lurie’s career reads as a causa sui project. He leaves the Bay Area for New York and the Robin Hood Foundation. He stands blocks from the towers on the morning of September 11, 2001, and he helps rebuild downtown, and the rebuilding marks him. He takes a master’s at Berkeley and writes a business plan for a foundation. He comes home and builds Tipping Point and raises more than five hundred million dollars against poverty. Then he runs for mayor as the outsider, the first man elected to the office with no government experience since 1911, and he wins. Each step adds something he made to the pile of things he was given. The dollar salary is the purest move in the sequence. A man who works for nothing cannot be bought, and a man who cannot be bought has earned his place.
Watch the word service move through him. His father, Rabbi Brian Lurie, ran the Jewish Community Federation and helped Jews escape persecution. People he never met, he was helping, the son says. His mother worked on early childhood education. His stepfather extended domestic partner benefits at Levi’s before the law asked for it. The boy takes the script from the parents. Wealth is a stewardship. Giving is how a man holds his standing. Service means the gift, the convening, the room. Lurie’s gift is access. He can call business leaders across the country. He gets Roger Goodell and Jed York to lunch at the Wayfare Tavern. He sits donors down at the Michelin starred Quince and turns the dinner into a clean street or a housing unit or a permit office. His hero is the effective philanthropist-executive, the man who makes the city work by moving money and people into the right configuration. When he says service he means this. The competent gift, given well, at scale.
The word will not hold still. Service means one thing inside Lurie’s project and other things inside other men’s, and Becker’s point is that the sacred word has no meaning apart from the system that supplies it one. Carry service to a Marine staff sergeant and it means the men on his left and right, the unit that outlives the man, the willingness to die so the others walk home. The gift there is the body, spent. Carry it to a Carmelite nun and service means the emptied self, the hours given to God and not to the dying woman in the bed, who is the occasion and not the point. Her immortality is the soul and the Him she serves, and the gift flows up, not out. Carry the word to a Korean eldest son raised on filial duty and service means the ancestors and the line, the debt to the dead and to the children not yet born, the name carried one more generation. Carry it to a longshoreman on the San Pedro docks who runs his union local and service means solidarity, the brothers, the wage and the hall, and the gift is an insult, because charity is the thing the owner hands you instead of power. Carry it to a founder mid raise in a glass office and service means the product that scales to a billion users, the company that stands as the man’s second self, and giving back is a thing you schedule after the exit. Carry it to a Ghanaian trader who tithes to a Pentecostal church and service is witness, the gift is the gift of the Spirit, and the immortality is the literal kind, the body raised. Same word. Six lives. Each one denies death by a different road, and each one hears Lurie’s dollar salary in its own key. The sergeant might respect it. The longshoreman hears a rich man performing a virtue the union fought to make unnecessary.
Set the longshoreman’s project beside Lurie’s and the quarrel comes clear. The dockworker’s hero system says a man earns his standing by his labor and holds it through his brothers. Dignity comes from the wage, won by the strike, defended by the hall. In this project the gift is the enemy of dignity. The almshouse, the soup line, the foundation grant, the anonymous check, each one keeps the poor man a recipient and the rich man a patron and freezes both in place. The Haas family gives anonymously and counts the anonymity as grace. The dockworker’s tradition reads the anonymous gift as the most polished form of power, power that takes the credit while hiding the hand. Lurie’s hero needs the poor man helped. The longshoreman’s hero needs the poor man paid, with a union card and a vote on the contract. One system fights poverty with the gift. The other fights it with the wage and the strike and treats the gift as the thing that keeps the wage low. They use the same word, service, and they mean opposite things by it, and neither man lies. Each tells the truth his hero system allows him to see.
Every hero system buys its meaning by subtracting something from view. Becker called these the vital lies, the things a man must not see if his project is to hold. Lurie’s project requires him not to see that the gift and the power are the same act. He convenes a council of billionaires. Sam Altman (b. 1985) co-chairs his transition. Michael Moritz (b. 1954) and Chris Larsen (b. 1960) each pledge around two million dollars toward his effort to rewrite the charter and hand the mayor more power. The men who fund the city’s repair are the men who own the city, and the repair runs along the lines they prefer. His project requires him not to see that the homeless man in the Tenderloin he visits once a week and the donor at Quince hold fixed and opposite seats, and that the seat is the gift’s precondition. It requires him not to see that a contract steered toward longtime donors over a cheaper, higher rated bidder is the gift coming home. He reads none of this as corruption. He reads it as how a city gets fixed, because his hero is the convener and the convener’s art is the room. He tells no lie. His hero cannot afford to notice this and stay a hero.
How much of this does the man see. More than most heirs, and less than he thinks. He knows the wealth sets him apart from the voter, and he says so, and he asks to be judged by the choices he made rather than the money he was born to. That is a man half aware of the worm. He rejects the founder’s creed of move fast and break things, which tells you he has felt the danger in his own donor class and stepped back from it. The awareness stops at the edge of the gift. He cannot question the gift, because the gift is the hero, and to question it is to walk back toward the heir’s terror, the suspicion that he is a checkbook and a name. So he doubles the gift. The dollar salary, the hundred million dollar pledge, the childcare subsidy, the five hundred million raised. The harder the doubt presses, the larger the giving grows. Becker might read the scale of the philanthropy as the size of the fear it answers.
Three coordinates locate the man. The shape of his hero is the effective philanthropist-executive, the convener who fathers his own worth by giving so well and at such scale that the gift becomes an earning, and the heir becomes, at last, self-made. The rival he fights without naming is the longshoreman’s project, the tradition that grounds dignity in the wage and the vote and the union card and treats the gift as the patron’s way of keeping the poor man poor and grateful. He never names this rival, because to name it is to see that his own instrument, the gift, is the thing the rival indicts. The cost his ledger cannot price is the recipient’s standing. Lurie can house a man, employ a man, subsidize his childcare and clean his street. He cannot make the man his equal, because the help runs one way and the help is the point, and a hero system built on the gift needs a giver and a taker and cannot dissolve the gap that hands the giver his significance. The city may grow safer and cleaner and richer under him. The controller’s numbers may all move the right way. The man in the Tenderloin may sleep indoors at last. He will still be a man who was helped. That is the one thing the dollar salary cannot buy back for him.
