The Finite Nature of Permanent Good
True philanthropy recognises that foundations, like their creators, must embrace mortality. When charitable institutions pursue perpetuity, they inevitably surrender their revolutionary spirit to the gravity of self-preservation.
The permanent foundation eventually becomes what it once sought to replace—a bureaucratic entity more concerned with its continued existence than its founding mission. Its original purpose dilutes with each passing generation until it resembles little more than a well-funded sinecure for administrators and a platform for whatever political causes capture its evolving sensibilities.
Far more powerful is the foundation that plans its own demise, that operates with the focused urgency of a terminal diagnosis. By accepting an endpoint, it gains the freedom to deploy resources at transformative scale rather than timidly preserving principal. It can strike decisively at problems that require immediate, overwhelming force—like eradicating disease or eliminating systemic poverty—rather than merely treating symptoms in perpetuity.
The greatest act of philanthropic wisdom may be acknowledging that the future belongs to the future's visionaries. Today's solutions inevitably become tomorrow's problems. Better to solve what we clearly see before us, then release our grip on resources so that coming generations might address challenges we cannot yet imagine with methods we cannot yet conceive.