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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

The Guardian boosting the public school-educated son of a neoliberal economist and supporter of eugenics, whose most lasting achievements seem to be artisanal coffee, cheese, and cosmetics empires that serve very comfortable middle class people, is the most Guardian thing ever.

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The only part about the father in the entire article was a touching vignette about how Saunder’s dad would go above and beyond to answer his son’s questions.

Did something in the article or Saunders’ life point to him being neoliberal or into eugenics?

Your comment is strange; I assume you would not like it if people applied the sins of your father to you. If anything, the fact that Saunders turned out the way he did despite his father should be a cause for celebration.

Your comment made me sad that you thought a clearly positive-sum person’s life story could be summed up so pithely.

I guess the point of the parent comment is that the way Saunders turned out - closing his store after a newspaper report about it, because normal customers are killing the vibe - is because of his father.

(I don't know anything about his father. If anything, he might have been more egalitarian, after all neoliberal economics is about businesses serving everyone.)

And yeah, it is a wonderful story despite that. Comments don't have to sum up the story.

Being public school educated and coming from the sort of family that implies - one of corrupt and disproportionate power - definitely makes your story much less inspiring. That's a lot of cultural capital, connections and financial support that most people can't dream of. Really undermines the whole life lesson about the power of counter culture.

I'm not sure I'd call the story inspiring, but it's certainly _interesting_. Public school or no public school, it is very unusual for someone to change a country's culture so dramatically, seemingly largely by accident (or at least you don't get the impression from the article that he _set out_ to change the mainstream culture).

> undermines the whole life lesson about the power of counter culture

The big 'life lesson' you learn if you study counterculture is that pretty much every big counterculture figure was a 'trustafarian' or from - at the very least - a tidy upper-ish middle class family.

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