Unreflektiert

Die unersetzlichsten Menschen der Welt haben bekanntermaßen eine ganz besondere Persönlichkeit, mit der sie sich aber ungern beschäftigen:

William Shatner, the nonagenarian actor, stood beside Jeff Bezos in the desert, trying to explain his despair.

It was 2021, and Shatner had returned moments earlier from a voyage on one of Bezos’s Blue Origin rockets. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness, Shatner would later write. All I saw was death. He concluded that reflecting on humanity’s relative insignificance could help us rededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other, to life and love all around us.

Shatner was attempting to relay these impressions to a grinning Bezos. Then the billionaire turned from him, mid-sentence, and called for a champagne bottle, which he shook and sprayed on a group of celebrating women.

The clip went viral in part, I imagine, because it seemed to confirm a widely held suspicion: America’s tech oligarchs are pathologically unreflective. From their perspective, looking inward is a waste of time better spent moving fast and breaking things, or hoovering up money and consolidating power.

That thesis received further confirmation earlier this month when the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said that he engages in zero introspection—or at least as little as possible. Andreessen, a billionaire AI evangelist, was speaking to the podcaster David Senra, who enthusiastically approved. Senra explained that he had learned introspection was useless by reading 410 biographies of entrepreneurs. Sam Walton didn’t wake up thinking about his internal self, Senra said, referring to the Walmart magnate. He just woke up like, I like building Walmart; I’m gonna keep building more Walmarts, and just kept doing it over and over again.

Peter Thiel also has doubts about self-reflection. In 2024, the billionaire investor contended on Joe Rogan’s podcast that looking inward can impede action. He suggested that introspection was the stuff of hippies, who derailed American technological progress when they took over the country in the late 1960s.

None of these men seem to have considered the possibility that self-examination is valuable in itself. The goal has never been simply to stew, but to correct our motives, desires, and actions to avoid delusion and live ethically. Indeed, extending empathy to others isn’t even possible without first understanding ourselves. A world devoid of introspection would resemble a schoolyard full of children picking fights forever, unable to perceive how their actions affect one another.

The people who seem least interested in introspection are also those whose work is most profoundly shaping our collective reality. These are the supposed visionaries whose insatiable demand for data has disenchanted the world. They are the funders of opaque new forms of intelligence that could upend the economy or possibly exterminate us all. These are the people who most need to understand themselves.

If you go back, 400 years ago, it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective, Andreessen continued on Senra’s podcast. Great men of history didn’t sit around doing this stuff at any prior point. It’s all a new construct. Until the early 20th century, he claimed, consequential people simply did things and built stuff. Reflection and self-criticism—looking backward, as Andreessen put it—amounts to a guilt-based whammy that comes from Europe, a lot of it from Vienna.

Der völlige Verzicht auf Selbstbetrachtung und historisches Wissen muss ungemein befreiend sein. Auf reflektiertes Gemecker aus dem Internet oder die geringe Unterstützung durch die üblichen Sozialistinnen und Neider –

A march supporting California’s billionaires didn’t exactly attract a huge crowd on Saturday — the San Francisco Chronicle counted around three dozen attendees, along with another dozen tongue-in-cheek counter-protesters.

To be fair, organizer Derik Kauffman had predicted attendance of only a few dozen beforehand. But the incongruous idea of the March for Billionaires has provoked an outsized response on social media. And according to Mission Local, journalists nearly outnumbered demonstrators at the event itself, where marchers carried signs with messages like We ❤️ You Jeffrey Bezos and It’s very difficult to write a nuanced argument on a sign. 

The ostensible reason for the demonstration was to protest the Billionaire Tax Act, a proposed state ballot measure that would require Californians worth more than $1 billion to pay a one-time, 5% tax on their total wealth. Governor Gavin Newsom said he has been working behind the scenes to block the ballot measure, which he would not be able to veto.

– reagiert ein in sich ruhender Kapitalist jedenfalls souverän wie ein Dreijähriger die große Edith Piaf:

It is 100% true that great men and women of the past were not sitting around moaning about their feelings. I regret nothing.

Darüber hinaus könnte die Selbstdiagnose als Psychopath bei der nächsten Revolution noch nützlich werden:

When you examine your own motivations, desires, and inner life, neuroscientists have discovered, you are using the same parts of the brain that allow you to understand the motivations, desires, and inner lives of others. This means in turn that when you wall off access to your own inner life you also impair your capacity to imaginatively inhabit the experience of other people. Zero introspection is not just a personal quirk or a supposed productivity hack. It’s a permission slip for zero accountability. And Andreessen, it turns out, has good reasons for wanting to avoid accountability. [...]

A man with enormous influence over the technologies of war and surveillance, over the political direction of the country, over the infrastructure of violence that his firm has spent a decade funding, has, in effect, announced that he has no interest in examining his conscience.

Andreessen has built the perfect ideology for Silicon Valley in the Trump age: Move fast, break people, and don’t devote even a moment to self-examination.

(/via kottke.org)

Auf mangelnde Steuerungsfähigkeit zu plädieren, sollte angesichts der öffentlichen Äußerungen der letzten Jahre kein Problem sein.