Review

Culture

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29 October 2025

10 min read

Wanted, not wasted: the older brother who couldn’t lead

In Peaky Blinders and House of Guinness, Steven Knight shows being needed—not being perfect—transforms

Will Fagan

Will Fagan serves as a minister in the Episcopal Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

Dressed in Victorian clothes, two brothers raise their arms together.

Anthony Boyle and Louis Partridge in House of Guinness.

Netflix.

If you’ve watched House of Guinness recently, you’ll find show creator Steven Knight return to familiar territory: masterfully exploring complex dynamics between brothers, family legacy, and ambition – captivating themes he previously explored in his ever-popular Peaky Blinders. In the respective dramas, we find both older brothers struggling to fit into roles and living with the weight that often accompanies that struggle.

In societal terms, we are not unfamiliar with the oldest son’s placement as the first in line of dynastic succession and head of the family. The Prince of Wales will succeed his father as King; Prince George will succeed his father and so on.

This dynamic plays out, of course, in common lives as well. Throughout history, the oldest son, as a rule, inherited the family home, the landholdings, and the family business (even if its legal standing was murky at best): Santino became the Don (The Godfather, 1972), Josh Kroenke and Tony Kahn essentially run their respective fathers’ Premiership football clubs, and at some point in your family line, I bet a great uncle took over his father’s blacksmith shop, leaving his younger brother – your direct line – left to fend for himself. (You’re here, after all, so things must have worked out, anyway.)

What happens, though, when the oldest son is not fit to assume this role in succession? How does he respond if he is passed over? And what happens when he’s actually needed by the younger brother, the successor?

As Peaky Blinders opens in its first series, we are presented with a perspective that Arthur Shelby, the older brother, is the boss of the family bookmaking syndicate and racketeering operation only to soon discover that his smarter, more ambitious, and more capable younger brother, Tommy, leads the family.

Being passed over naturally plagues Arthur, and his behavior consistently confirms why he isn’t fit to lead: he is quick tempered, demonstrates poor judgement, and goes on drug-induced benders. He is loyal when he is sober, and you can’t help but love him, but you wouldn’t hire him to run your company, either. By the opening of the show’s concluding series, he is shown passing his days in an opium shop, strung out and all-but-abandoned by his family.

Knight revisits this theme within the Guinness family in his newest show, set in the 1860s and three generations after the founding of the brewery, the family well-established as the first family of Ireland and wealthy beyond measure.

From the start, family tension and doubts about the brewery’s continued success are palpable. At the time of his father’s death, the oldest Guinness brother, also named Arthur, is frivolous, irresponsible, and debonair, having returned to Dublin for his father’s funeral after years of carousing in London. He is unkind, arrogant, and frankly does not care what happens with the company, so long as its sale finances the rest of his life. (You don’t root for him like you root for Arthur Shelby.)

At the time of the reading of his father’s will, anticipating he would inherit the brewery and the bulk of the family property only to sell it, Arthur Guinness finds his father had other plans, haunting him from the grave. He learns that he and his younger brother Edward – responsible and having apprenticed at the brewery – would inherit an equal stake of the brewery and family wealth, but that Arthur would be entitled to nothing if he did not participate in the running of the business, something he neither wants nor cares to do. He wants to be the older brother to inherit but has less-than-no desire to lead the family.

Saddled with expectations that he neither wants nor could succeed under, he continues his path of ruination – marrying for convenience, partying in unfit circles, and participating in election fraud, all bringing the family into public scandal and private torment. Moreover, and perhaps of greatest importance, he knows that he is the oldest son who cannot succeed, who was never built to, and that his father did not trust him. Thus, he pursues the only thing he is good at – willful self-destruction.

Well, this is great saga material – one that we will undoubtedly follow in the Guinness family in the coming years – but for us poorer mortals, why care?

I believe, and I don’t think this is an overstatement, that there is an older brother in all of us. We may not be the actual older brother ourselves waiting to be handed a family fortune only to not receive it, but odds are that at some point there was an expectation thrust upon us – or even one we placed on ourselves – to be a certain type of person or to achieve a concrete level of success, and that didn’t work out.

Have you, for instance, taken a chance in bringing the antiquated family business into the twenty-first century only to watch it go belly up? Have you found yourself in a relationship for too long “for all the right reasons” because everyone wanted it but you didn’t? Did you want to study architecture at university but read law instead because your father and grandfather were called to the bar and now you find yourself drawing neo-classical designs in the courtroom?

What happened, then, when that expectation or dream did not come to fruition? Have you, even to a small extent, arrived at the future and found you’re not who you thought you’d be? To not achieve that thing we were destined for, to not rise to the standard, as it turns out, can often leave us in the same state of the black sheep older brother – directionless, lacking a clear station in life and without a sense of worth.

What is interesting and what is helpful, if I can go so far as to say, is that we find this dynamic at the moral heart of family and social relationships across millennia, a dynamic which is presented in the Christian understanding of relationships.

Christianity’s understanding of relationships – with both God and one another – rests on two essential claims. The first is that humanity was created for one clear purpose – to love God and to live in perfect harmony with creation and fellow man. According to Genesis, the first book of the Bible, this was the expectation of our divine father, the role destined for all children of God. Yet Adam and Eve, the original children, failed to live righteously according to the standard God gave them and were viewed, thus, as guilty before God. All their descendants (which is to say all humanity) inherit that guilt because of what Christian teaching calls original sin.

That may sound both celestial and like Sunday school at the same time, and you, by the way, don’t have to take my word for it. But if you were to say that you do live in harmony with God, creation, and fellow man perfectly, I might be compelled to ask, “How’s that really going?”

When we look around and are honest, we are free to admit that things are not perfect, and we live with the weight of imperfection.

How do we feel, for example, when we let someone else down? How does it feel when we wake up with a moral hangover? How does it feel when we don’t get the position because of an unexplainable gap in our CV, even though we think we’re fit for it? We can see quickly enough that sublime internal or cosmic harmony does not, in fact, exist in our lives or in any of the created realms. More so, we find that it’s not actually attainable.

Are we left, then, to live lives with potential unrealized, spiritually incongruent, and unfulfilled? Will the black sheep part of ourselves – perhaps not evidently front and center but certainly left in the margins – become the core of who we are and how we interact with the world?

As it pertains to Knight’s dramas, a curious occurrence happens to each of these older brothers during the arc of their respective shows, particularly in relation to their younger brothers.

At some point in every series, Tommy Shelby realizes that despite everything, the one person he needs by his side is his older brother, Arthur. He needs him as he takes down crime boss Billy Kimber and expands the family business; he needs Arthur to be the one to end the vendetta with the American mafia, and, finally, to be his strength and support as Tommy faces his dark and uncertain future in the final series, telling Arthur in the darkness of a damp cellar, “You will change because I need you.”

Similarly, in House of Guinness, faced with looming political trouble, wanting to expand the brewery, and to continue the family legacy of philanthropy in Ireland, Edward Guinness looks to his older brother Arthur – the only person he can – to fulfill the other half of the inherited partnership and to gain political ascendancy, their father’s MP seat, for the cause of good. He needs him.

How do these older brothers—otherwise unfit for duty—respond?

In each case, paradoxically, they don’t crumble under the weight of expectation, but heartily rise to the occasion, becoming the man who their younger brother needs them to be. They are able to do this, by the way, not because there was some secret unfulfilled potential inside them all along (clearly they are who they are), but because despite their self-destructive patterns, the older brothers actually step up when needed because the younger brothers treat them as though they are worthy of being needed.

Put another way, having worthiness ascribed to them makes them feel worthy, and the result is that they change, they deliver, and their own self-worth changes with it. They each become, as it were, a new man.

What are we to draw on from this?

Returning to Christianity’s understanding of relationships – with both God and one another – we find its second essential claim: it is that God knows that our lives are not perfect and harmonious, that we do struggle, that we do have dreams and expectations unrealized, all of which can, depending on the severity, leave one quite weighed down and without a clear path forward.

If there is good news that can be spoken into that state (and there is), it is that God is not a father with his arms crossed forever disappointed in his firstborn. He is a father who sees the whole picture, knows all the facts, and he has done something about it in the great narrative arc of the Christian story – the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. The result of which is that we flawed individuals are seen not as those who fail to love and obey God perfectly but as those who are worthy of being wanted.

If we can learn anything from these brothers in Knight’s dramas, it is that we need not climb out of imperfection and into success to be unburdened. We find that being seen as worthy is enough. And that changes – as it does for Arthur Shelby and Arthur Guinness – everything.

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Molly Worthen on the charismatic leaders of America's cosmic drama

The plots and plotters that hold us spellbound

Nick Jones

Nick is the senior editor of Seen & Unseen.

Viewed from behind, Trump raises a fist.

Trump on the stump.

White House via Wikimedia Commons.

What happens when Americans lose faith in their religious institutions—and politicians fill the void? In Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump, Molly Worthen sweeping history helps us understand the forces that create leaders and hold their followers captive.

Everyone feels it. Cultural and political life in America has become unrecognizable and strange. Firebrands and would-be sages have taken the place of reasonable and responsible leaders. Nuanced debates have given way to the smug confidence of yard signs. Worthen asks just how did we get here?

Worthen, a historian argues that we will understand the present moment if we learn the story of charisma in America. From the Puritans and Andrew Jackson to Black nationalists and Donald Trump, the saga of American charisma stars figures who possess a dangerous and alluring power to move crowds. They invite followers into a cosmic drama that fulfils hopes and rectifies grievances—and these charismatic leaders insist that they alone plot the way.

Author and historian Tom Holland loved this book.

“The great story of charisma in American history, from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to MAGA, has never been more thrillingly told, never more learnedly explicated.”

In this extract, entitled Plotlines, Worthen introduces her four categories of charismatic leader: Prophets. Conquerors, Agitators, and Gurus.

Plotlines

Over the past several years, whenever I told friends or family that I was writing a book about charisma, they responded with a reasonable question. Which charismatic figures would I include? They peppered me with suggestions: What about Elvis Presley, or Dolly Parton? Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali? Surely I had to say something about Taylor Swift, right?

None of these fascinating people appears in this book. As you read it, you will probably think of a dozen others whom you wish I had included, and I’m sure you’ll have a point. I have mostly stuck to individuals who worked to build a movement in organized religion or politics, rather than musicians, artists, or athletes. Even within the spheres of religion and politics, I’ve been selective in order to craft a manageable story and bring into focus the patterns and transformations of charismatic leadership over the course of American history.

Sometimes this is an inspiring story, because charismatic leaders often turn up—and people decide to follow—out of a desperate response to alienation and injustice. People in anguish seek a savior. Yet charisma has no fixed moral standing. It can carve a path to freedom or to enslavement; it can lead people to embrace the rule of law or to sneer at it. Charisma causes problems for democracy as well as for authoritarian regimes. Without a sustained analysis of charisma over the long haul of American history since European settlement began, we are doomed to bumble along, blandly observing that ordinary people declare many allegiances that seem to contradict their own material interests and sabotage democracy—but never understanding why.

Over the past four centuries, five types of charismatic leaders have surged to dominance, each offering a variation on the great paradox, a different way for followers to hand over control while feeling liberated. I use these categories both to classify leaders and their movements, and to chart historical change: each type reacts to the type that came before, and responds to the pressures and anxieties of its own era. Like all typologies, this one maps imperfectly onto real people. Almost no one is a “pure” example of these categories, and some leaders are interesting precisely because they react against their age’s dominant type. But these categories have compelled even leaders who defied easy labels—that’s most of them—to respond to the ascendant charismatic style of their age.

The Prophets take us from the end of the Middle Ages into something beginning to resemble our own world. They drew on ancient patterns of contact with the divine to challenge authorities and captivate followers with the terror and ecstasy of God’s presence. They hewed close to tradition, operating in a time when Old World strictures still constrained life in the New World rather tightly. But some used those traditions to undermine reigning institutions, whether by violent rebellion or illicit gatherings—and so provoked a backlash. If the Prophets conceived of freedom in terms of divine salvation, they often harnessed mystical power for this-worldly ends. Usually this meant dismantling any structure that stood in God’s way.

The Prophets were, essentially, destroyers. In their wake they provoked an age of builders.

The Conquerors rose to prominence in the early nineteenth century—an age of mythology, mass media, and frontier enthusiasm in the European American imagination. They swung away from the age of the Prophets, who had so much to say about how powerless humans are.

Some of the Conquerors wielded military power, but all of them pursued what we might call metaphysical conquest. They fought to control spiritual forces. As the predestinarian Puritanism of earlier generations lost its appeal, more people placed an almost fundamentalist faith in the power of free will. It was tempting to think of spiritual forces—perhaps even the Holy Spirit— as a kind of technology, ready for manipulation. The stakes in these campaigns were high at a time when new advances in science impinged on everyday life. Waves of immigration made the country more religiously and ethnically diverse. Americans felt both freer and yet more confined than ever before.

The Agitators gained sway at the turn of the twentieth century, protesting modernity as a raw deal and democracy as tyranny in disguise. The Conquerors had, overall, expanded government authority over Americans’ lives and advanced a golden idea of progress. Now the pendulum swung back toward calls for destruction. The Agitators found a market for attacking the state and denouncing so-called progress as a lie. They defined themselves as outsiders whether they were or not, and discovered that gaining material power does not mean that one must stop telling a story of exile and affliction. This proved to be an important lesson in an age of world war and economic disaster: global crises have a way of transfiguring an outcast dissenter into a credible threat tot he standing order. Meanwhile, Christians grew wilder in their displays of New Testament charisma—because, paradoxically, it was easier to grapple with what Max Weber called the “iron cage” of modernity by embracing ever more outlandish signs of divine power.

The Experts were, on the face of things, the Agitators’ opposite in charismatic style. They were builders. In the wake of World War II, they capitalized on a backlash against the nightmare years of fascist demagogues, embraced the zenith of traditional institutions’ authority across Western culture and politics, and nurtured Americans’ faith in the power of technology and bureaucracy to solve large-scale problems.

They claimed the mantle of reason and procedure and did their best to relegate the political or religious clout of charisma to the distant past or primitive cultures.

But in fact, the three decades after World War II witnessed an explosion of religious revival in America—led by Christians who spoke in tongues, looked for the end times, and claimed to heal through the power of the Spirit. Even in the domain of credentialed and supposedly secular healing, the line between medicine and spirituality grew fuzzier. These years were the Experts’ apogee of cultural prestige, but Americans’ long- standing ambivalence about intellectual elites persisted. The most successful leaders capitalized on those mixed feelings. They nursed the tension between the Cold War celebration of science and freedom and, on the other hand, the lurking sense that technological leaps obscured eternal truths and needed the organizing power of a good story.

By the end of the twentieth century, as Americans lost faith in established media, churches, government, and nearly every other bulwark of modern society, the destructive strain of charismatic leadership re-surfaced in the form of the Gurus: preachers of self-actualization and get-enlightened-quick schemes, promoting God’s new temp job as personal assistant. Old-fashioned Pentecostal revival persisted too, but its leaders struggled to prevent the culture wars from capturing the Holy Spirit.

The Gurus looked, at first glance, like the Prophets and the Agitators. But in the generations since those earlier eras, it had become harder to pay obeisance to tradition—which was just fine, since the erosion of institutions had weakened traditions anyway, and opened a path for Gurus to achieve more influence than their destructive predecessors. Religious and philosophical tradition, in the hands of the Gurus, was no longer a firm guide but a palette for painting illusions of independence. Sometimes they used it to depict a new reality impervious to fact-checkers.

“Guru,” which means “remover of darkness” in Sanskrit, was originally a religious term. But in the third decade of the twenty-first century, the most prominent guru in the country was a businessman named Donald Trump. Trump was not, personally, a paragon of conventional religious devotion. Yet his political career depended on a hunger among his most dedicated supporters that can only be called spiritual. Like so many relationships between charismatic leaders and their followers, it stumped and angered those on the outside. Against the backdrop of the American charismatic tradition, however, his success makes perfect sense.

How, then, did early modern mystics and Puritan heretics who heard the voice of the Holy Spirit give way to devotees at a modern presidential rally, jostling toward the candidate iPhone-first, praying for a selfie? By the early twenty-first century, most religious institutions in the West had declined into husks of their former authority—at least by the usual measures. Today commentators turn more than ever to materialist explanations for political dysfunction, polarization, and the culture’s general crisis of confidence. They cite growing social inequality, impassable disagreements on policy, persistent racism and xenophobia, evil automated forces lurking on the internet. All true—yet all insufficient accounts. If we define the religious impulse as a hunger for transcendent meaning and a reflex to worship, then it is a human instinct only slightly less basic than the need for food and shelter, and Americans are no less religious than they have ever been. They will always find a way to satisfy these desires, even if charisma carries them down strange and costly paths.

Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump, Penguin Random House, 2025.