Josh Allred's Blog

In 1901, when J.P. Morgan purchased Andrew Carnegie’s steel company for $480 million, he said, “Congratulations, Mr. Carnegie, you are now the richest man in the world.” Retiring from business, Carnegie published an essay called The Gospel of Wealth. It is considered by many today a foundational document in the field of philanthropy. 

When you read it, however, Carnegie made his case about why the capitalists bring value and his solution to the rise in wealth inequality. In it, Carnegie promotes ideas that still live today, including:

• That hard work and perseverance lead to wealth. (Carnegie believed that he was self-made.)
• That it is the wealthy’s responsibility to spread wealth through charity. It was up to the rich’s discretion how much and who deserved it.
• This charitable giving had to create economic mobility opportunities. Carnegie didn’t believe in a nanny state, but instead, to receive something, you needed to give something.  
• Finally, his language, from the divinity, sacredness, duty, and responsibility around wealth, changes the lens of how we view our culture.

To his credit, Carnegie did preach progressive taxes for the rich and for the rich to live more modestly with their fortunes. But the essay ultimately demonstrates the disconnect the powerful had become at the turn of the 20^th century, as demonstrated by the Monopoly experiments. No one is arguing if Carnegie worked hard, but did he work harder than the forger or the assembly workers making the steel? Why does wealth put you in a class above others—make your voice more important? Why does he decide who deserves his charity and who doesn’t? Which causes support, and which gets left in the cold? Why do we call it generosity or charity if you give something while expecting something in return? 

It helps to think of the Human Brain as a play-by-play football commentator. We are wasting time arguing with this narration in our head when all it is doing is commentating on what the chemicals are doing. Imagine the ball being snapped, the quarterback throwing an incomplete pass, and we are then yelling at the play-by-play commentator for what a stupid play that was and demanding that the commentator fix it. The commentator (Human Brain) has no control over what is happening on the field (Lymbic System). It is just doing play-by-play. It’s just narration after the chemicals have already been decided. So, when we are conflicted about eating or waiting to eat a marshmallow, we don’t need to waste energy negotiating with this narration.

This is a recurring theme in human history. 2,500 years ago, Hippocrates of Kos, considered the Father of Medicine, is credited as the first person to believe that diseases were caused naturally, not because of superstition and gods, and created a whole field of medicine separate from religion. It is essential to understand that humans have struggled to separate our beliefs and facts for as long as we can remember. We are entitled to our own beliefs, but we are not entitled to our facts. Each of us has our narrative of the world, but arguing the merits of gravity isn’t going to push the cannon forward of understanding, which is the key to our future prosperity. Hippocrates wrote, “Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine, which they do not understand, why there would be no end of divine things.” Hippocrates may not have had the term for it, but he described it as more intellectual debt. 

Kafka wrote, “I am a cage in search of a bird.”

In order for a cage to be complete, to fulfill its purpose is to have a bird to contain.

No one ever said, “I am a bird in search of a cage.”

Often, we fall into this trap of seeking security in exchange for freedom.

But that is a choice.

You are a person.

A human.

You are not a product–something much more.

The first example of luxury goods is attributed to King Louis XIV’s finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, in the 1660s. At the time, France was falling behind in investing in its navies and was missing out on the wealth gained from expeditions to the New World. As a result, Colbert decided to double down on domestic production instead of international, creating the first market for luxury goods. Now that expensive goods were in much higher demand from the upper classes, it was only a matter of time before someone marketed these products to them. 

Josiah Wedgwood, founder of Wedgewood Company in 1759, invented what we call marketing today. Wedgewood pioneered modern techniques such as direct mail, money-back guarantees, self-service, free delivery, buy one get one free, and illustrated catalogs. Wedgewood revolutionized how to conduct business and, when he died, was one of the wealthiest people on Earth. 

As the centuries passed, marketing became a “solution” to a “problem.” If you have problems, we can fix them with a product or service. But eventually, that wasn’t enough. Corporations began to come up with new wants and new desires to sell. Think about it for a moment. It wasn’t until the 1950s that the typical teenager became a consumer category. Before that, they owned one pair of shoes, not one for every occasion. This is vastly different from today. 

When you ask the question of what brands like Apple, Nike, Patagonia, and Harley Davidson, it is this: People like us buy products like this. Changing outsiders into insiders. Creating status that sends the signal to others about who we are and what we represent. Marketers no longer use simple demographics like age, race, ethnicity, gender, marital status, income, education, and employment. Today, marketing is done using psychographics to put pressure on our wants, desires, and dreams. The most famous example was in 2012 when Target had perfected its technique of analyzing consumers’ shopping habits so well that they could figure out who was pregnant before the customers even knew and were sending them advertisements to prepare for a baby. 

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis was the first to use the phrase “race to the bottom” to describe how American states would compromise their values to attract a corporation. Brandeis said this 100 years ago, in 1933. Today, the problem is even worse. In a race to the bottom, if we don’t do it, someone else will. We treat people as statistics, assign value by profit, and try to quantify happiness. The problem with a race to the bottom is that you might win. We sell out thinking the answer is to do what Walmart and Amazon do. But you can’t. No one can out Walmart Walmart or out Amazon Amazon—why then are we selling out and emulating like corporations?

Cassius: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

—Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene III

Cassius asserts that the “fault “of “underlings” like himself and Brutus is their own. They have allowed themselves to live at the feet of Caesar, and unless they do something about it, they will die meaningless deaths and be forgotten in time. Like Cassius and Brutus, we, too, are responsible for our actions—all of us. And until we can start taking responsibility for why we are here, we will not get out of this hole.

More importantly, the fate of humanity may already be determined. In four billion years, the Sun will eventually die, which would be the end of society unless we find a way to occupy other planets. By then, that is the end of the story. We live in a tragedy that can’t be escaped. I will buy that if you want to call that fate or determinism. But the cosmic destiny of the gods is just a myth.

What we can choose, however, is to take responsibility again and not just throw our hands up in the air thinking there isn’t anything to do and nothing we do doesn’t matter anyway. The journey is worth taking. That is why we choose to get up in the morning. Life has meaning when we decide it does.

The cruelty and evil displayed during the early days of the United States are perhaps unmatched in any period in human history. Slaves were indoctrinated that they were born inferior. It was even preached that it was part of God’s plan. Apostle Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians (King James Version, which is what was used at the time), “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in the sincerity of your heart, as to Christ.” There are plenty of other passages that God-sanctioned this type of behavior that justified the behavior of slave owners. 

In 1828, Federick Bailey was born into the world of slavery with no legal rights or protections. He was separated from his mother during his infancy and sent to his grandparents. His father was a white man who may have been his mother’s slave owner. At six, he was separated from his grandparents and was sent to a plantation. Bailey was then sent to Captain Hugh Auld and his wife Sophia at ten. Bailey felt fortunate when he was sent to work in the home. In the home, Bailey began interacting with books and letters and discovered “the mystery” of reading. Bailey made the connection that the lines of the page correlated with the sounds people were making. Bailey began studying Webster’s Spelling Book. He memorized the alphabet but struggled to understand the sounds made to the letters. Bailey broke down and finally asked Sophia Auld to help him. At the time, slaves were prohibited from learning to read. Whether it was ignorance or empathy, Auld agreed to teach young Bailey. When Captain Auld discovered what had happened, outraged, he ordered it to stop immediately. Captain Auld explained to Sophia in the company of Bailey:

“A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master—to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now, if you teach that nigger how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.”

Bailey later recounted, “I now understood…the white man’s power to enslave the black man. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.” It’s important to note that in 1860, it was estimated that 5% of African Americans could read and write. By 1890, it was 39%. It wasn’t until 1969 that literacy grew to 96%.

Without Sophia’s help, Bailey continued to find ways to teach himself how to read and then taught other slaves. Bailey wrote, “Their minds had been starved…They had been shut up in mental darkness. I taught them, because it was the delight of my soul.”

(I cried reading that passage the first time. It is so beautiful.)

Bailey eventually escaped and fled to New England, where slavery was illegal. He then changed his name to Frederick Douglas and became a social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, statesman, and the most important civil rights movement leader during the 19th century. 

It is easy to forget almost all of human history; we lacked tools for reading and writing. Books are a modern invention. And it wasn’t until the printing press was invented that we mass-produced them. That was just 500 years ago. With access to literature, all things are possible in the pursuit toward dignity and equity.

In Greek mythology, when Prometheus stole fire from heaven, Zeus took it personally and exacted his revenge by gifting a jar called Pandora to Epimetheus, Prometheus’ brother. When Epimetheus opened the jar, out flew into the world all the sickness, death, plagues, pestilence, and evils you can imagine. Though she hastened to close the container, only one thing was left behind – usually translated as Hope. Sometimes, however, hope has been translated to a more pessimistic meaning of “deceptive expectation.” Today, we use the idiom of opening “Pandora’s box” as a warning when starting something that will cause many unforeseen problems.

 No matter how hard we try, we can’t possibly put the knowledge of what we know about the universe back into the box. What’s left is for us to decide whether that hope is left in Pandora’s box or is that deceptive expectation. What is your point of view?