Marc Andreessen: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, yeah. So this is one of the all time great books. Incredible. About 20, 30-year-old book, but it’s completely modern and current in what it talks about as well as very deeply historically informed. So it’s called Private Truths, Public Lies, and it’s written by a social science professor named Timur Kuran, at I think Duke, and his definitive work on this. And so he has this concept, he calls Preference Falsification. And so preference falsification is two things, and you get it from the title of the book, Private Truths, Public Lies. So preference falsification is when you believe something and you can’t say it, or, and this is very important, you don’t believe something and you must say it. And the commonality there is in both cases, you’re lying. You believe something internally, and then you’re lying about it in public. And there’s the two classic forms of it. For example, there’s the, I believe communism is rotten, but I can’t say it version of it. But then there’s also the famous parable of the real life example, but the thing that Vaclav Havel talks about in the other good book on this topic, which is The Power of the Powerless, who is an anti-communist resistance fighter who ultimately became the president of Czechoslovakia after the fall of the wall. But he wrote this book and he describes the other side of this, which is workers of the world unite. And so he describes what he calls the Parable of the Greengrocer, which is you’re a greengrocer in Prague in 1985, and for the last 50 years, it’s been absolutely mandatory to have a sign in the window of your store that says Workers of the World Unite. And it’s 1985, it is crystal clear that the workers of the world are not going to unite. Of all the things that could happen in the world, that is not going to happen. The Commies have been at that for 70 years, it is not happening. But that slogan had better be in your window every morning because if it’s not in your window every morning, you are not a good communist. The secret police are going to come by and they’re going to get you. And so the first thing you do when you get to the store is you put that slogan in the window and you make sure that it stays in the window all day long. But he says, the thing is, the greengrocer knows the slogan is fake. He knows it’s a lie. Every single person walking past the slogan knows that it’s a lie. Every single person walking past the store knows that the greengrocer is only putting it up there because he has to lie in public. And the greengrocer has to go through the humiliation of knowing that everybody knows that he’s caving into the system and lying in public. is only putting it up there because he has to lie in public. And the greengrocer has to go through the humiliation of knowing that everybody knows that he’s caving into the system and lying in public. And so it turns into the moralization campaign. In fact, it’s not ideological enforcement anymore because everybody knows it’s fake. The authorities know it’s fake, everybody knows it’s fake. It’s not that they’re enforcing the actual ideology of the workers of the world uniting. It’s that they’re enforcing compliance and compliance with the regime. And you fuck you, you will comply. And so anyway, that’s the other side of that. And of course, we have lived in the last decade through a lot of both of those. I think anybody listening to this could name a series of slogans that we’ve all been forced to chant for the last decade that everybody knows at this point are just simply not true. I’ll let the audience speculate on their own group chats. Send Marc your memes online as well, please.…

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