Comment by cess11
5 days ago
I'm not so sure he is grifting, do you have any clips where he slips and shows himself to be knowledgeable of his society and its history?
I have a similar view of Musk, Thiel and Karp, and some others I can't be bothered to remind myself of. Perhaps the Mandelsons belong to this crowd, but I suspect the Kochs have a bit more of an intellectual slant.
It's known to take a lot of discipline to keep your mind sharp and study when your power grows and other people make your life convenient and shielded from the misery of the masses. Marcus Aurelius makes this a core issue of his Meditations, the strife needed to make true and confident measurements of oneself and not get lost in superstition. Perhaps it is an impossible ideal but the ambition is at least interesting, in contrast to whatever Andreessen and his ilk are doing to themselves.
It's a grift tactic (even the exact type of laugh when he brings up Freud), but I agree with you that he's not literally grifting, more like a white-washing.
Thanks for bringing up Meditations -- it was gifted to me three years ago. Although I roughly knew Stoicism, it was my first time reading it. It helped reaffirm my focus on OSS as a channel for personal improvement and contribution to society. With so much world chaos, probably a good time re-read it.
If that's your thing, maybe complement with Augustine's Confessions. He had a somewhat complicated relation to stoicism but was one of the most important patristic writers to make use of stoic ideas.
It's a document that details an interesting person, who takes both ethics and himself very seriously, much more seriously than is common in the contemporary occident.