Marc Andreessen: observation

Transcript context

…So this comes from a Italian political philosopher from about a hundred years ago named Robert … I’m going to mangle … I’ll let you pronounce the Italian. Michels or Michels. I learned about it through a famous book on politics. Probably the best book on politics written in the 20th century called The Machiavellians by this guy James Burnham, who has had a big impact on me. But in The Machiavellians, he resurrects what he calls this Italian realist school of political philosophy from the ’10s and ’20s. To be clear, this was not like a Mussolini thing. These were people who were trying to understand the actual mechanics of how politics actually works. So to get to the actual mechanical substance of how the political machine operates. And this guy, Michels had this concept he ended up with called the Iron Law of Oligarchy. And so what the Iron Law of Oligarchy … Take a step back to say what he meant by oligarchy because it has multiple meanings. So basically, in classic political theory, there’s basically three forms of government at core. There’s democracy, which is rule of many, there’s oligarchy, which is rule of the few, and there’s monarchy, which is rule of the one. And you can just use that as a general framework of any government going to be under is going to be one of those. Just mechanical observation. Without even saying which one’s good or bad, just a structural observation. And so the question that Michels asked was, is there such a thing as democracy? Is there actually such a thing as democracy? Is there ever actually direct government? And what he did was he mounted this incredible historical exploration of whether democracies had ever existed in the world. And the answer basically is almost never. And we could talk about that. But the other thing he did was he sought out the most democratic private organization in the world that he could find at that point, which he concluded was some basically communist German autoworkers union that was wholly devoted to the workers of the world uniting back when that was the hot thing. And he went in there and he is like, okay, this is the organization out of all organizations on planet Earth that must be operating as a direct democracy. And he went in there and he’s like, “Oh, nope.” There’s a leadership class. There’s like six guys at the top and they control everything and they lead the rest of the membership along by the nose, which is of course the story of every union. The story of every union is always the story of there’s a Jimmy Hoffa in there running the thing. We just saw that with the dock worker’s union. There’s a guy and he’s in charge. And by the way, the number two is his son. That’s not an accident. of there’s a Jimmy Hoffa in there running the thing. We just saw that with the dock worker’s union. There’s a guy and he’s in charge. And by the way, the number two is his son. That’s not an accident. So the Iron Law of Oligarchy basically says democracy is fake. There’s always a ruling class. There’s always a ruling elite structurally. And he said, “The reason for that is because the masses can’t organize.” What’s the fundamental problem? Whether the mass is 25,000 people in a union or 250 million people in a country, the masses can’t organize, the majority cannot organize, only a minority can organize. And to be effective in politics, you must organize. And therefore, every political structure in human history has been some form of a small organized elite ruling a large and dispersed majority. Every single one. The Greeks and the Florentines had brief experiments in direct democracy, and they were total disasters. In Florence … I forget the name of it. It was called The Workers’ Revolt or something like that. There was a two-year period where they basically experimented with direct democracy during the Renaissance, and it was a complete disaster and they never tried it again. In the state of California, we have our own experiment on this, which is the proposition system, which is an overlay on top of the legislature. Anybody who looks at it for two seconds concludes it’s been a complete disaster. It’s just a catastrophe, and it’s caused enormous damage to the state. And so basically the presumption that we are in a democracy is just by definition, fake. Now, good news for the US. It turns out the founders understood this. And so of course they didn’t give us a direct democracy. They gave us a representative democracy. And so they built the oligarchy into the system in the form of Congress and the executive branch and the judicial branch. So anyway, so as a consequence, democracy is always everywhere fake. There is always a ruling elite. And basically the lesson of the Machiavellians is you can deny that if you want, but you’re fooling yourself. The way to actually think about how to make a system work and maintain any shred of freedom is to actually understand that that is actually what’s happening. And lucky for us, the founders saw this and figured out a way to, given that there’s going to be a ruling elite, how to create a balance of power among that elite so it doesn’t get out of hand.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.