We Have Chosen the Wrong Heroes
Something has been bothering me for years. Most of the conversations I hear about how to be successful are about how to make as much money as possible. Nobody ever discusses the impact that they would like to have on the world. People retire, only to consider their value in their net worth and not at all whether or not the world is better today than it was when they got their start. In America, as we deal with rising costs of just about everything and decreased quality in, well, just about everything, I’m starting to become suspicious that this obsession with wealth over impact is the biggest problem we are facing. People have been finding ways to extract as much money as they can from things while depreciating the quality of it. I commonly hear people bemoan this phenomenon. And it begs the question: how exactly did we get it all so backwards?
I think the answer is simple: we have begun admiring the wrong people.
All our old heroes were worth admiring. Leonardo Da Vinci was a genius polymath who not only pioneered human anatomy and engineering but was also a world-class painter. Abraham Lincoln was a prolific lawyer and fought to free people from slavery in a time when it could have destroyed the country he presided over. Albert Einstein was a physicist who dared to question the certainty of Newtonian Physics and ended up providing us most of the backbone of our modern understanding of how the physical world works. These people were not only famous in their time, but they are also still in our minds today. And for good reasons.
However, over the past century, our heroes have become less impressive. They are hollow when compared to the heroes of old. Gone seem to be the days of genius polymaths. Gone are the days of celebrity physicists. Gone are the days of the men who fought to build this country with a vision for a free land.
Today, we worship investors who have built nothing except a portfolio with good returns and politicians chanting daily for war against people on the other side of the world that none of us have met or have a coherent reason for why they are bad guys, all supposedly in pursuit of “peace.”
As a result of worshipping these false prophets, the people we should be cheering for have been lost in the noise. And the people who might have become modern-day heroes were corrupted by a system that compelled them to make money over having a positive impact.
All our would-be physicists were swept up by finance executives who promised a salary quadruple that of a physics professor to do money math on a trading floor.
All our would-be inventors became addicted to videogames when they were kids and instead of building flying cars used their computer skills to build an app for immigrants to deliver McDonald’s to your door.
And all our would-be carpenters are unskilled and unemployed, going to bed tonight in their parents’ basements, having been told that manual labor was beneath them.
The heroes are dead. In their place are crooks selling you stock for a company they invested in, a war their campaign donors told them they must support, or a supplement that sponsors their podcast.
This whole transition has to do with money. After the industrial revolution, American’s were able to become as wealthy as royals. Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and Ford all amassed incredible wealth building companies that brought us into the modern age. From there, the shift of our heroes began. Instead of being builders, inventors, artists, and scientists, they became executives, investors, political leaders, and athletes. We no longer wanted to hear from people who taught us how to understand the world or seek fulfillment. We all just wanted to get rich (and quickly, please.)
The inspiration these hollow heroes give us drives us in the wrong direction. Instead of striking thoughts about the nature of the universe from Richard Feynman, we have pithy quotes about investing principles from Charlie Munger. Instead of Michaelangelo’s David we have a banana taped to a wall at Art Basel.
Clearly, our standards in the people we choose to influence us and what we expect of them are dropping.
Once upon a time, our country’s leader’s biggest issues were how to build a free nation and unshackle the chains around the feet of slaves. They were not bought and paid for by the interests of other countries. However, today, they seem to only be focused on destroying a group of people in the Middle East because they don’t like the religious book that these people read. Or, at least, that’s what they tell us. Because, if you follow the trail that their campaign donors leave, you’ll see a different story altogether.
Our politicians, like the investor class, only care about money. The invention of the stock market shifted our focus away from building things that made the world wealthy to building personal wealth passively with as little effort as possible. As a result, it was no longer useful to admire those that built things. But, instead, we began looking at those that found a great investment opportunity before anyone else that made them rich without having to, oh I don’t know, invent something that makes the rest of our lives easier.
People like Marc Andreesen, who created the first modern web browser, which is arguably an unimpressive feat, stopped creating new things and now just invests in them. As a result of his ability to shell out his billions to useless tech companies, he has become a regular guest on the Joe Rogan podcast to tell you how great his latest investment in a government spy app is doing.
We have literally fallen from grace. Remember, we once went to the moon. Men, who were truly brave, walked on a surface in our solar system 250,000 miles away from Earth. Everyone knows the names Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong. Nobody knows who the Administrator of NASA was at the time. However, if I were to ask you what the names of any astronaut who is currently residing in the International Space Station are, you couldn’t tell me. Sadly, I couldn’t tell you either. But we all know who the CEO of the world’s “most valuable” space company is.
Yes, I’m talking about Elon. People like Elon Musk are part of the problem. Elon Musk is another failed physicist. He claims he is an engineer. But his real claim to fame is his financial engineering. Elon leans on his degree in economics more than he leans on his degree in physics. He just recently duped the world into believing his space company, which makes $18.7 billion in revenue and loses $4.9 billion a year, is worth $2.5 trillion dollars.
Financial engineers like him are the reason why everything is decreasing in quality and increasing in cost at the same time. We handed the keys to our castles to salesmen, marketers, and number crunchers who are all narcissistic enough to think that they are the prize. Those people then employed inventors, engineers, explorers, and physicists and convinced them that their mind-boggling monthly salary and stock options were worth the price of never being known for the thing they built and being second fiddle to the guy who hired them.
Gone are the days of Edison, Washington, and Einstein. We have ushered in the era of Musk, Trump, and Buffett.
And very soon, we will have wished we hadn’t.