The Philosopher Kings, Part II: A Correction

A necessary correction of the moral record.

I owe my readers an apology.

My previous essay on Marc Andreessen left the impression that he is a man of some moral worth to society. I want to correct the record. This was a form of whitewashing, and it was epistemically irresponsible of me. I should have been clearer. I will try to do better now.

My last piece was too kind.

I want to correct that. Not in the sense that I misstated anything — I did not — but in the sense that I failed to properly describe the prodigious depths of what we are actually looking at. I left the impression that the man contains some human qualities worth engaging. I apologize for the confusion. Let me try again.

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A clip has been circulating this week of Andreessen in conversation with David Senra, a podcaster who studies the habits of “great men.” The thesis on offer was this: great men of history had little to no introspection. The personality that builds empires is not the same personality that sits around quietly questioning itself.

I watched it. And then I wrote this, on X:

Shorter @pmarca: “I really don’t give a fuck about anything other than pursuing the objects of my desire. I am unbothered by how these pursuits may affect others. And I believe this makes me great.”

I want to explain, with some care, why this is not a rhetorical attack. It is a philosophical diagnosis. And the philosophy in question is not obscure.

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Aristotle’s theory of virtue — laid out in the Nicomachean Ethics, which one could read in an afternoon, and which apparently no one in the a16z reading group has — is built on a single mechanism: the examined life produces virtue because it is the only process by which a human being can identify where they have fallen short of the good, and correct course. Without reflection, moral development is structurally impossible. You are not merely unlikely to improve. The faculty that produces improvement has been switched off.

This is not a peripheral concern in Aristotle. It is the center. Know thyself. The examined life is not a lifestyle preference. It is what distinguishes a human being from an animal operating on appetite.

When Andreessen announces, proudly, that introspection is useless — that great men don’t dwell on the past — he is not making a productivity argument. He is making a moral declaration. As I noted in reply to Tom Nichols, he is admitting to being a man completely lacking in virtue in any Aristotelian sense. He is sitting there, considering himself a great man of history, by proudly declaring that he cares nothing for others and relentlessly pursues the objects of his desire.

Aristotle had a word for this. The akolastos: the intemperate man who has so thoroughly habituated himself to appetite that he no longer even experiences the pull of the good. Who doesn’t struggle against his worst impulses because he has extinguished the part of himself that would recognize them as such. The akolastos is beyond correction not because he cannot be shown the good, but because he has trained himself not to see it.

This is not a man who has made peace with his flaws. This is a man who has made flaws into a philosophy.

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I am aware that some will say I am being uncharitable. That Andreessen is simply describing a psychological type, not endorsing moral vacuity. That he is making an empirical observation about the personalities that build things.

Let me address this by noting what is on the a16z reading list.

Carl Schmitt.

For those unfamiliar: Carl Schmitt was the Nazi jurist who provided the intellectual framework for the suspension of democratic norms in the service of sovereign power. His central thesis — that the political is defined by the distinction between friend and enemy, and that the sovereign is whoever decides the state of exception — is not a neutral political science observation. It is the theoretical architecture of authoritarianism. It is what you put on your reading list when you have decided that democratic accountability is the obstacle rather than the point.

My friend Vlad Vexler would describe what Andreessen is selling as hyper-neoliberal. I think that is correct, and I think it does not go far enough. Hyper-neoliberalism describes the economic program. Schmitt on the reading list describes the political program. Put them together and you have something that deserves its right name.

The man is a fascist.

I do not use that word loosely. I use it the way a person uses a word when they have examined the evidence and found that it fits.

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I spent an essay dismantling Ayn Rand’s ideology — a project I do not regret, though I confess some irritation at having had to do it. But I want to give Rand her due for one moment, because even she would wince at this.

Rand, whatever her considerable intellectual failures, believed in the rational mind. She believed that the great industrialist was great because he thought — because he applied reason to reality with more consistency and rigor than his contemporaries. Her heroes were not anti-introspective. They were obsessively introspective, in their cold, arid, sociopathic way. The examined life, for Rand, was the prerequisite of the productive life.

Andreessen has gone somewhere Rand did not go. He has taken the selfishness and discarded even the pretense of reason. What remains is appetite without examination, will without reflection, power without philosophy. It is not Objectivism. It is not even coherent enough to be called an ideology.

Marc Andreessen is enschittification incarnate. He is a living synonym for what the word means — the process by which a platform, or a person, or an idea extracts maximum value while delivering minimum accountability, until the underlying thing collapses under the weight of its own extraction.

Right down to his basic thought processes.

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I said in my last piece that the network state is not a city on a hill. It is a gated community with a podcast.

I should have said: and the man selling it has proudly announced that he does not reflect on what he has done, does not consider how his pursuits affect others, and believes this makes him great.

The philosopher king was supposed to have seen the Good.

This man has announced, in public, on a podcast, that he has deliberately blinded himself to it.

We should take him at his word.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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