Marc Andreessen

And the idea being basically it's sort of driven by a pathological, you know, take it backwards, a pathological form of empathy on the one hand, which is, you know, it's sort of a deep desire to be nice and empathetic, you know, but coupled with like basically, you know, a sort of self-destructiveness, you know, either a willingness to really cause damage to the people you claim to be speaking for or by the way to cause damage to yourself.

Kind of in that process.

And it's the kind of thing where, you know, if you've lived through, you know, like everybody in San Francisco has lived through this for the last decade and seen the consequences of these movements.

You know, the San Francisco version of this is like the, quote, harm reduction movement, you know, that ended up basically handing out, you know, free drug, you know, paraphernalia and, you know, in some cases actually just free drugs to, you know, people who were just literally dying in the street from drug addiction.

So you just look at it and you're like, well, yeah, they claim to be activists, they claim to be reformers, they claim to care about these people, and yet they're killing them and then killing the city and causing innocent people to get harmed.

It's like, okay, they seem so actively like they're doing it out of some sense of compassion that this must be suicidal empathy.

The problem with it is, and I think the problem is the theory is sort of easily falsifiable or maybe lets the reformers off the hook, which is,

they certainly don't show empathy to their enemies.

And so if they're like all empathetic, you would think that they would be less aggro when it comes to destroying their ideological opponents, who they take great delight in trying to wreck, number one, on the one hand.

And then number two is they use the classic reformer move is to use these movements to gain power and status and money for themselves.

And again, San Francisco is a case study of this where you have all these nonprofits that recall this damage on the city and yet basically get like lavishly funded, including, by the way, by the city government, by the state government.

And so it's just like, okay, well, like just like they're not, if you just like spend two seconds thinking about it, like, you know, they're neither empathetic nor are they suicidal, right?

Rather quite the opposite.

They're hateful and they're greedy.

You know, they're sort of self-aggrandizing and gathering a power of resources for themselves.

And so I just think it lets the phenomenon off the hook.

You know, it's a little bit like, oh, Eric, what's your biggest flaw?

You know, oh, I'm too nice.

Yeah, I care too much.

Right, exactly.