I saw this rather revealing tweet recently:
Andreessen, if you don’t know, made his money during the dot-com boom, at Mozilla. He then formed a venture capital firm, Andreessen-Horowitz.
Now what’s interesting about this tweet is the word “guilt.”
Andreessen doesn’t want to feel guilt. He doesn’t like the idea that one should run society to try and do the most good for the most people.
Understandable, venture capital in the 21st century has mostly created firms which profit from using as few workers as possible and San Francisco, the heart of Silicon Valley, has gone to Hell. Andreessen’s filthy rich, and he has to see homeless people every day. If he felt guilt about being having way more money than he’ll ever need while other people go hungry and live without heat, cooling and a dry place to sleep, he’d feel guilty pretty damn often or would have to spend a lot of his two billion to feel good.
But that’s not the point I want to make.
It is fashionable to go on and on about taking care of family and friends, and that’s a good thing up to a point.
But only up to a point. Societies work best when members care about people they’ll never meet. If we all look out only for those close to us, the actions we take to do so often hurt those who aren’t near us. Private equity buys firms, loads them down with debts and they go bankrupt, destroying the lives of workers. Bankers create asset bubbles which burst. They get bailed out and if they don’t are still worth millions from bonuses based on fraud, but ordinary people lose jobs, homes and healthcare. Insurance companies and pharma overprice their services, deny care and get rich. Ordinary people aren’t blameless either, we NIMBY and care about schools in our neighbourhoods but not in slums, and complain about the homeless and tell the cops to move them out but don’t want to pay for their housing. We look after #1 and we vote for truly evil people and a majority, it seems, would never vote for someone actually good. We want low taxes and cheap goods and segregated housing prices that never go down.
This is… stupid. Society is other people. If other people are sick, we’re more likely to get sick. If other people are poor, they can’t pay for whatever products or services we produce. If people are homeless we find that distasteful and unpleasant to be around. Unhappy people, of course, are not as fun to be around as happy people.
And so on.
The better off everyone is in society, the better it is for you and me, unless we’re rich enough to live in a bubble, rarely seeing anyone but servants and our fellow rich. But even a billionaire will sometimes see a poor person, if only from their limo or looking down from a chopter, and they might feel some guilt. (If Andreessen does feel guilt, well, that’s mildly impressive in a pathetic sort of way. I doubt most billionaires do. But he’s repressing hard.)
And then one day someone flips out and kills a CEO, and others start talking about how wonderful CEO killing is. Perhaps making other people poor and miserable and killing their relatives might be a bad idea even for the masters of the universe. Might just be a good idea to care about people Andreessen doesn’t know, because one of them might get past his security one day.
Or, I guess, we could have assassinations, bombings, riots and civilization collapse.
It really is one or the other. If oil company execs had cared about people they don’t know they wouldn’t have buried climate change and financed denialism. If insurance and pharma and hospital execs cared about people they don’t know, there’d have been no assassination because they’d be trying to make sure as many people as possible got the care they need instead of optimizing to make more money.
It might just be that only looking out after people you know and care about and not giving a damn about anyone else is not just morally right, but pragmatically right.
Or you can bet on your bodyguards and the security of your gated communities, I guess. That’s a good bet, till it isn’t.
Adam Eran
A concrete example of a society gone to Ayn Rand is the US. It cages people five times more (per capita) than the rest of the world. That’s seven times more than the Canadians or French (again, per capita). So…is Canadian and French crime worse than in the US? No, actually their crime rates are lower. How do the manage to do without the carceral state? Well, one difference is that the US has roughly a half million medical bankruptcies annually. Canada and France have socialized medicine; they don’t do that.
The ultimate problem for the carceral/belligerent state is recruiting minions. Army and CIA recruitment is down now in the US.
bruce wilder
Andreessen, like most billionaires, objects not so much to government per se as being governed. He is annoyed that anyone (other than a fellow billionaire bro, natch) might have interests opposed to his and the government might arbitrate that conflict not in his favor.
We had a discussion in comments not so long ago where I objected to usury and some commenters insisted usury was necessary to “help” its victims. Many of us cannot fight our own corner.
Feral Finster
“Or you can bet on your bodyguards and the security of your gated communities, I guess. That’s a good bet, till it isn’t.”
I dunno, that has been the norm for most people in most places throughout nearly all of history.
The West is well on its way to being a glorified Brasil, albeit a Brasil with worse weather, less attractive females, and a more hyperbelliberent foriegn policy.
Senator-Elect
Yup, well said. It boils down to the Golden Rule, which you have written about before. Treat others as you would want to be treated, for you are an “other” to everyone else and so will be treated accordingly.
The concept is simple, yet most people have probably never thought of it before. And in our massive, complex societies, it is even more important. I’m not sure we will ever figure it out since we seem biologically programmed to only care about those we know. So once we live in a community above a few thousand people, the caring about others goes out the window. Everyone else is an anonymous, faceless, family-less person. Driving around in cars only widens the mental divide between us by creating even more of a physical divide.
Soredemos
There’s the notion (and who said it escapes me at the moment) that a way to measure if a society is fundamentally decent or not is to imagine yourself at any level in that society. If you’d be essentially comfortable and content even if you were on the lowest rung, then it’s probably doing okay.
For the broader notion of caring about people you’ve never met, this is part of the divide between Confucius and Mozi. Confucius believed familial clan loyalty should be the beginning and end of basic social cohesion, while Mozi thought it’s a natural starting point, but basically you should end by viewing all humans as your brothers. Confucianism would of course ultimately become a philosophical bedrock to all of East Asian civilization because it amounts to ‘know your place’ and is very conducive to social stability, while Mozi ended up largely forgotten.
someofparts
Michael Hudson said that the reason ancient societies had jubilees, upon the ascension of new kings, was in order to make sure large numbers of working people remained solvent, the better to man armies and pay taxes. Left unchecked, fortunes made from interest quickly surpassed those made from ordinary enterprise, giving rise inevitably to a class of oligarchs. Left unchecked the oligarchs would pursue their class interests to the point of pushing ordinary workers and tradesmen into such poverty that the nation itself was destroyed. Ancient pre-Roman rulers understood this and had debt-cancellation jubilees to protect the people and the state from oligarchs. The Romans were unwilling to do this and now here we are, oligarchs running amok, perishing on the same hamster wheel that brought down our Roman progenitors.
Feral Finster
“The ultimate problem for the carceral/belligerent state is recruiting minions. Army and CIA recruitment is down now in the US.”
Offer green cards upon completion of an enlistment hitch. Problem fixed.
The citizenry won’t like it, but nobody will ask them.
Chris West
Dunbar’s Number means that there’s a physical limit on how many actual human connections our brains can physically manage. Anything beyond that requires social constructs like ethnicity, race, religion, nationality, and gender, which range from being mostly to entirely fake. Sorry our social primate species isn’t fit for living like bees, ants, wasps, or naked mole rats. Maybe we’ll reincarnate as a more sociable animal – it’s our only hope.
Oakchair
Our government is aiding and abetting a genocide, it starts a war that kills a million people every few years, life expectancy is falling while rates of chronic illnesses are skyrocketing, homelessness is skyrocketing among a long list of shit. What is Andreessen concerned and raging about? Having to feel guilt while roaming around in his yacht at his 4th lake house mansion.
“You are an anonymous clog.”
The masses know that’s how your class considers them Mr. Andreessen, it’s why they cheered when an anonymous clog shot down the mass murdering oligarch.
bruce wilder
@dylanmatt is serving mind mush, imho. I don’t know if that matters to the argument. It certainly does not absolve Andreesen of his “Who is John Galt? (its me, wonderful me!)” attitude to the little people whose neediness annoys him.
But, I feel like there could be some condescension and bloody-mindedness hiding behind rationales that focus on proper allocation of other people’s philanthropy
mago
There’s a Buddhist practice and contemplation wherein one considers all sentient beings as one’s mother in one life or another throughout the vastness of time and space. (Reincarnation is a given in that view).
Just as a mother gives birth and nourishes her offspring throughout all worldly travails, so have all sentient beings helped and nourished each of us in turn. Thinking in this manner one generates a sense of loving kindness toward all.
Yeah, that’s a conceptual stretch, for sure.
Included in that same canon is the reflection that those who act spiritually are rare as stars in broad daylight.
Gotta take the long view, the broad view to affect any fundamental change I guess.
shagggz
@Feral Finster,
“The West is well on its way to being a glorified Brasil, albeit a Brasil with worse weather, less attractive females, and a more hyperbelliberent foriegn policy.”
Why single the females out?
breac
@Soredemos
Re knowing that if you’re at the lowest rung of society you’ll be ok, i think you’re talking about john rawls? the idea that lawmakers operate under a “veil of ignorance”, they don’t know what station they will occupy, the top the middle or the bottom, and they make laws accordingly. they have to hedge their bets.
like all the best insights, when you first hear it it hits you like a train, and then in retrospect you go “well, d’uh, of course!”
shagggz
@breac,
“well, d’uh, of course!” – Yes, simple and elegant, a variation of the “I cut, you choose” approach to cutting up a pie.
Jan Wiklund
There is a name for only caring about relatives: mafia.