The unexamined life is a good one, according to the high-profile venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. “If you go back 400 years, it would never have occurred to anybody to be introspective,” the co-founder of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz told David Senra, host of the Founders podcast, on Sunday.

During his appearance, Andreessen blamed Sigmund Freud and the Vienna Circle for making the practice respectable. “All of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy […] are a kind of manufacture of the 1910s, 1920s,” he claimed. Of course, he eschews this self-examination as vigorously as the Victorian vitalists shunned masturbation — another solitary vice. “Move forward. Go,” he explains. While Senra congratulates him on developing a “zero-introspection mindset”, the broader reaction on social media has been negative.

The proposition that the history of literature and philosophy is empty of self-examination is a novel one, even in the West. In much Asian thought, introspection is the means by which the world can be understood and the individual’s moral purpose discovered. The Chinese philosopher Mencius called it “seeking the lost heart”, the process of recovering what is innate. The “unexamined life”, according to Socrates, was not worth living. Self-examination played a central part in the teachings of the Stoics, Jewish Musar literature and Augustine. In Hamlet, Shakespeare warns of the perils of too much introspection: clearly, this was not a new concept to Elizabethan audiences.

However negative the reaction, Andreessen’s violent reordering of history is significant, given the influence he now wields among the political class. The idea of capital serving society, or even the economy, by playing a modest facilitating role in reducing investment risk has been supplanted by a much more dramatic role in which venture capitalists direct affairs rather than respond to them. Politicians now look to speculative capital not merely to provide the ever-elusive economic growth, but to give a nation purpose — a habit for which Chancellor Rachel Reeves has received criticism.

This matters because politicians and the public have to deal with the consequences of venture capital’s wild bets. Andreessen has become more aggressive with his rhetoric, with his 2023 accelerationist tract “The Techno Optimist Manifesto” even containing an “enemies” list including “the ivory tower” and “Friedrich Nietzsche’s Last Man”. It’s a short hop from there to Peter Thiel giving lectures about the Antichrist and condemning his own enemies of progress.

An absence of introspection is far from uncommon in Silicon Valley. The rationalist CEO of financial technology giant Stripe, Patrick Collison, who has helped fund hundreds of new projects under the banner “Progress Studies”, shows similar characteristics. What Collison most wants, he says, is an “an AI product that inhabits my AirPods and continually mutters interesting things about the world around me, like an indefatigably burbling tour guide”. Anything to avoid looking inside oneself.

For all Andreessen’s triumphalism, the reordering of society that he desires requires the consent of the governed. Silicon Valley now makes big demands, such as the weakening of copyright to benefit its AI investments, which affect significant parts of the economy and people’s lives. His interventions are only likely to make these harder to sell. “It makes sense for people with no introspection to be susceptible to believing LLMs are essentially AGI [artificial general intelligence],” observed the roboticist Filip Piękniewski in response to the interview with Senra. “He’s saying he has no soul,” was another reaction to Andreessen’s rejection of self-examination. Perhaps what these moguls are really evading is themselves.

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Andrew Orlowski is a business columnist at The Daily Telegraph and a former systems engineer.

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