Marc Andreessen: belief

Transcript context

…But he was a very bright guy, and he did this whole thing where he talked about, basically he was very right-wing and talked about leftism a lot. And he had this great concept that’s just stuck in my mind ever since I read it, which is he had this concept just called over-socialization. And so most people are socialized. We live in a society, most people learn how to be part of a society. They give some deference to the society. There’s something about modern Western elites where they’re over-socialized and they’re just overly oriented towards what other people like themselves think and believe. And you can get a real sense of that if you have a little bit of an outside perspective, which I just do, I think as a consequence of where I grew up. Even before I had the views that I have today, there was always just this weird thing where it’s like, why does every dinner party have the exact same conversation? Why does everybody agree on every single issue? Why is that agreement precisely what was in the New York Times today? Why are these positions not the same as they were five years ago? But why does everybody snap into agreement every step of the way? And that was true when I came to Silicon Valley, and it’s just as true today 30 years later. And so I think most people are just literally, I think they’re taking their cues from, it’s some combination of the press, the universities, the big foundations. So it’s basically, it’s like The New York Times, Harvard, the Ford Foundation, and I don’t know, a few CEOs and a few public figures and maybe the President if your party is in power. And whatever that is, everybody who’s sort of good and proper and elite and good standing and in charge of things, and a sort of correct member of, let’s call it coastal American society, everybody just believes those things. And then the two interesting things about that is, number one, there’s no divergence among the organs of power. So Harvard and Yale believed the exact same thing. The New York Times and The Washington Post believe the exact same thing. The Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation believe the exact same thing. Google and whatever, Microsoft believe the exact same thing. But those things change over time, but there’s never conflict in the moment. And so The New York Times and The Washington Post agreed on exactly everything in 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020, despite the fact that the specifics changed radically. The lockstep was what mattered. And so I think basically we in the Valley we’re on the tail end of that, in the same way Hollywood’s on the tail end of that, in the same way New York’s on the tail end of that, the same way the media’s on the tail end of that. It’s like some sort of collective hive mind thing. e same way Hollywood’s on the tail end of that, in the same way New York’s on the tail end of that, the same way the media’s on the tail end of that. It’s like some sort of collective hive mind thing. And I just go through that to say, I don’t think most people in my orbit, or let’s say the top 10,000 people in the Valley or the top 10,000 people in LA, I don’t think they’re sitting there thinking basically, I have rock … I mean, they probably think they have rocks solid beliefs, but they don’t actually have some inner core of rock solid beliefs. And then they kind of watch reality change around them and try to figure out how to keep their beliefs correct. I don’t think that’s what happens. I think what happens is they conform to the belief system around them, and I think most of the time they’re not even aware that they’re basically part of a herd. Is it possible that the surface chatter ……

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