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.
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