Marc Andreessen, one of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley, doesn’t do introspection. So he tells David Senra—whose great point of pride and life achievement, according to Senra’s website and statement to Andreessen, is that “I’ve read obviously four hundred, I think now, ten [that’s 410] biographies of history’s greatest entrepreneurs”—in a conversation that’s been making the rounds online.

Many commentators seem intent on challenging Andreeseen’s claim that he doesn’t do introspection. It is, after all, a bit of a performative contradiction, since the mere affirmation, when asked if he has any levels of introspection, “Zero, as little as possible,” would seem to require at least some introspection and stock-taking. Otherwise, how would he know?

But I’ll believe Andresseen. If for no other reason than that it’s what he says about introspection that truly beggars belief. Though it’s hard to make it all out because he and Senra speak so fast that they garble their words; I guess slowing down to make sure you’re enunciating rather than swallowing your syllables is frowned upon in Silicon Valley. Wasting time, inefficient.

Andreessen says that the great men of history, by which he means entrepreneurs, were not introspective people. They had no self, no guilt, no soul, no depth, no nothing. They were externally lived lives. Not like Nietzsche’s Superman, which I thought was the go-to model for most of these types, or least a vulgar version of the Superman. But that’s not what they have in mind. They’re thinking, to the extent that they are, of the ancient Greek, pre-Socratic precursors that Nietzsche imagines great men once were, before conscience, guilt, religion, and the rest imprisoned these great men of externality. Andreessen doesn’t, of course, rehearse that genealogy, but that’s the genealogy, the story, behind his statement. At the end of his General Theory, Keynes said that “practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” If only that were true. Andreessen seems to be the slave of some defunct pop psychologist or biographer.

Or maybe a defunct historian. For Andreessen claims that introspection and guilt were invented in the 1910s and 192os, in Vienna, by…Freud. Before Freud, there was no guilt, introspection, or soul-searching. That’s an odd claim, on two fronts. First, Freud thought he was alleviating the problem of guilt, which had tortured human beings for thousands of years. Second, well, guilt and introspection have been torturing human beings for thousands of years. Not just in the obvious ways—think religion, think Christianity, think Augustine or Luther—but in the less obvious ways. Has Andreessen ever heard of a play about a great prince in Denmark named Hamlet? Has he ever read Montaigne? A nineteenth-century novel? He might be interested in Bulstrode, George Eliot’s great investment banker, who’s behind all sorts of massive projects to improve the English countryside in nineteenth-century Britain, and carries a great weight of guilt and a terrible, terrible secret, which ultimately dstroys him. I’m sure one of Andreessen’s AI bots can tell him about Hegel’s unhappy consciousness or Marcus Aurelius’s thoughts on the unexamined life (and the real life of power that accompanied those thoughts).

So why this focus on Freud? Again, could be some defunct historian. Or could be some funct antisemite. After all, it’s long been a complaint of the radical right that the world was ruined by three great Jews: Einstein, Marx, and Freud. I guess the right needs the physics, so they’ve allowed Einstein. And they’re no longer worried about a threat from the left over economics, so they don’t care about Marx. But that leaves the final frontier of the sick soul, which Andreessen allows is a problem, at least “at home.” Apparently the Andreessen family has a big therapy bill? I can’t imagine why. Anyway, you can see how someone like Andreessen under the right influence, might see Freud as the source of his family tsuris.

It’s interesting that he mentions 1910 and Vienna. Had he only moved up his timeline by one decade, and cast his eyes a little further north, to Germany, Andreessen might have stumbled across the name Max Weber. A good goy, of Prussian stock, Weber was obsessed with the inner life of the capitalist, what made such men tick. He had a tragic sense of the bourgeoisie. It was their fusion of greatness and grimness, their misery and mastery, that made them the builders they were. It wasn’t in the sun-soaked Catholic Mediterranean or the Muslim Middle East that capitalism arose. It was in the guilt-stricken, cold and Calvinist cruelty of the North, in Hamburg and Amsterdam and Rotterdam and Puritan Britain, that capitalism emerged. It was among all the terrified, anxious, sick souls of the Reformation, desperate for any sign of salvation, stricken by the possibility that they would be damned to hell, that the men of money stumbled upon the secret of capitalism and salvation. No one could be sure if they were the recipients of God’s grace, but in worldly accumulation, in material and economic success, they might have a sign that God looked upon with blessing. These were the tortured geniuses of modernity, Weber thought, the heroic creators of capitalism, and without all their angst, their introspection, their stricken souls, we’d be still stuck in the Dark Ages.

Now comes Andreessen to tell us…nah. Which makes me think Andreessen is letting us in on a very different kind of capitalist self. He believes in all the heroism, the great conquest, the empire-building. But where previous generations of analysts, from liberals to Marxists, and economic actors, from Andrew Carnegie to Sam Walton (contra Senra, who thinks Walton just built Walmarts without thinking, the Waltons were obsessed with God and religion; Senra should stop reading his 410 biographies and have a look at Bethany Moreton’s book), thought that great accumulation required great soul, and great soul required great depth, Andreessen has a vision of a capitalist self that looks remarkably like the zombies that population Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man.

I assume Andreessen thinks he’s telling the truth, about himself and about the world. He’s not. He’s an ignoramus. He really doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But I assume he wants not only to think he knows, but he also wants to actually know.

There’s a solution for that kind of conundrum. Take a class in history, sociology, literature, philosophy, political theory. Don’t ask Chat GPT, which will tell you what you want to hear. Don’t talk to people who say things like “I’ve read obviously four hundred, I think now, ten” of anything and think they’re actually saying something. Read a book, a whole book, with someone who’s taught it a lot, then discuss it with that person, and with other people who are reading it, then maybe write, say, a couple of thousand words about the book, and do that again, a few times, over the course of, say, four months, and then do all of that again, over the course of another four months, and, lo and behold, you’re in college, taking classes, thinking, writing, talking (slowly, so you can be understood), becoming a person. Not necessarily a good person but at least a person who knows what he’s talking about.

And, this by the way, in case it is not yet clear, is why we need the humanities and the social sciences, and why they must be taught in universities, by trained and compensated scholars.