Capitalism's war on introspection
Chiling interviews with Marc Andreseen and Peter Thiel highlight one of the most dangerous features of capitalism.
I have a longstanding aversion towards the kind of pseudo-psychological commentary that dominates modern political punditry, but you don’t have to be a licensed therapist to notice something deeply unhealthy emanating from Silicon Valley this week. Here’s Marc Andreseen’s latest appearance on Tech Bro Glazing Podcast #8593:
David: You don't have any levels of introspection?
Marc: Yes, zero. As little as possible.
David: Why?
Marc: Move forward. Go! I found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past…If you go back 400 years ago it never would've occurred to anybody to be introspective. All of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy, and all the things that kind of result from that are a kind of a manufacture of the 1910s, 1920s.
And here’s Peter Thiel on Tech Bro Glazing Podcast #9105:
Thiel: We focus on changing ourselves — is this the first step to changing the world, or is it a sort of hypnotic way in which our attention is being redirected from outer space to inner space? …We stopped going from outer space because we stopped going to inner space.
Some folks have been reading this talking point’s sudden appearance as a “coordinated attack on introspection,” but I think this is too generous. The far more likely explanation is that this is just the latest goofy idea to infect the Silicon Valley hivemind through its primary vector: Marc Andreseen group chats. The oligarchs like to think of this as their version of “European salon culture,” but it has a lot more in common with a clique of college sophomores staying up late to argue whether the universe is, like, just an atom in another universe. When the billionaires want to do a coordinated attack they start buying up media outlets and launching dark money PACs; when they all start saying the same thing, this is just a reminder that our heterodox freethinking “makers” are mostly just a herd of semiliterate intellectual trend-chasers who never think for themselves.
This is all just posturing, of course. People who don’t introspect don’t spend a lot of time talking about it, either. Recall that when Julian Jaynes famously argued that the ancients lacked interiority, his primary evidence was that they simply never wrote about their inner lives. Homer did not demonstrate the rage of Achilles by showing him engaged in furious inner deliberation; Achilles was simply a man of action, and his rage was an outpouring of mindless raw emotion. Marc and Thiel are nothing like this. These are men who show up on three podcasts every week trying to philosophize and imbue their banal careers with cosmic significance; these men are clearly obsessed with their own minds and with what makes them tick.
So why are they pretending otherwise? Or to put it another way: what is it about contemporary corporate culture that would promote a discourse that discourages introspection?
One possible explanation is that contemporary corporate culture is dominated by actual psychopaths. This is just a clinical fact: one well-known 2010 study found that corporate managers are four times more likely to meet the criteria for psychopathy than the general population, and subsequent research has only driven that estimate upwards. Since one of the most distinct biological markers of psychopathy is reduced activity in the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex — parts of the brain that are deeply involved in introspection — it might not seem too surprising that C-suite executives would trivialize that kind of thinking.
But again, while it may be fun to diagnose Thiel and Andreseen as unwell, and while I do think there is evidence of other disorders at work here, I do not think the case for psychopathy is, for them, actually all that strong. One of the most curious characteristics of the PayPal Mafia guys is that they do not display some of the telltale signs we associate with psychopaths. None of them, for example, are especially charming; on the contrary, guys like Andreseen and Elon Musk have an unusually off-putting social tone-deafness about them. And none of them, as noted, lack the affect and interiority that psychopaths typically lack.
These men are not psychopaths — they are simply guys who want to defend psychopathic behavior. Once we make that distinction I think we can better understand what is going on here.
While the psycho-sociological literature on executive psychopaths is extensive, it almost always approaches this topic with a few narrow questions in mind:
What are the unusual behaviors that can help us distinguish psychopaths from healthy executives?
How is it that psychopaths manage to thrive in the workplace when so many other people afflicted with personality disorders fail?
How can we change the workplace so as to successfully screen out psychopaths or prevent them from causing harm?
What all of these questions have in common is the way they frame psychopathy as an “externality”, as economists would put it — as a kind of foreign problem that pops up in the workplace and becomes an obstacle to business in the same way that a falling meteor or an employee with the flu might. What the research shows us, however, is that psychopaths succeed not by disrupting capitalism, but by radically conforming to its demands in a way that most people do not. Capitalism rewards extreme risk-taking that ordinary people would regard as reckless or irresponsible, but that psychopaths have no misgivings about. Capitalism rewards competitive aggression that ordinary people would see as cruel or unethical, but that psychopaths have no problem with. Capitalism even rewards criminal behavior, something that ordinary people are loathe to engage in but that psychopaths just see as business as usual.
To put this in psychoanalytic terms, if the id expresses our most primitive and fundamental drives and desires, and the superego is something like our conscience, then capitalism encourages us to throw off the superego and identify as wholly with the id as we can get away with. For psychopaths this is easy since their superego is unusually underdeveloped. For the rest of us, however, being a good capitalist means training our ego, which negotiates between the superego and the id, to ignore our conscience and focus on satisfying our desires.
Or to put it another way: being a capitalist means abandoning introspection. It means learning to not think too hard when it’s time to take risks, to not feel pity for the workers you just layed off, and to not feel guilty about what Silicon Valley calls “permissionless innovation,” and what normal people call “breaking the law.” Some psychopaths can do this naturally, but if you weren’t born with deteriorated brain functioning, capitalism means that you have to become a master of psychological avoidance, willing yourself to simply not reflect on those pangs of conscience and anxiety that would keep the rest of us up at night.
The irony here is that despite what Peter Thiel thinks, avoidance does not represent a turn from “inner space” into “outer space.” The person who gives himself over to his id is entirely defined by his inner wants, needs, desires, and psychoses. He is not some Nietzschean man of action; he is an animal living the mindless self-absorbed life of an animal. It is only through the superego that we can engage with the outer world of rationality, of the social, the political, and the moral. Introspection makes us conscious of inner drives that otherwise distort and dominate our perception of the world around us.
Capitalism is often described as an ideology of the ego, but from a psychoanalytic perspective this is entirely wrong. Capitalism is the ideology of the id. It has created a world where your best chance of success is to stop thinking about what you’re doing and give free rein to your most primitive, infantile desires. And it is true, as Andreseen says, that our society often valorizes people who do this as “great.” But it’s also tragic.
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