Notes from: Marc Andreesen
Andreesen on DYI Religion in Silicon Valley
EconTalk podcast, July 2023

I think there definitely is [some thirst in the culture of Silicon Valley for philosophy and religion and other sources of wisdom outside of engineering]. I think people who don't have that at some point realize that there's something missing. The challenge is that the temptation is then to try to roll your own.
     This is what I think the effective altruists have essentially done. This is what the AI X-race[?] people have done. This is what the rationalists have done. This is what the atheists generally do is they, they're kind of like: ...we can think from first principles. Right? Like, everything we do in science and technology is based on thinking from first principles. And so, therefore, we can do that in religion and culture and philosophy and figure out how to live a good life.
     Nietzsche talked about this, 'Okay, God is dead. We'll never wash the blood off our hands.' His point was: Okay, it's not so easy to create your own values. It was a hard-won struggle over thousands of years to get to Judaism and get to Christianity and get to all of these things. And good, bad, indifferent, whatever you think of them, they went through a process of winnowing good and bad ideas for their Lindy [referring to the Lindy effect]. They went through a process of an evolutionary process for a very, very long time.
     ...what are the odds that people generally who have had technical educations and have had very thin humanities educations; or maybe even worse, have had modern humanities educations, which is maybe worse than having no humanities education these days--what are the odds that they're going to sit down and construct from scratch, a complete approach fundamentally to philosophy and ultimately to life?
     The odds of that are very poor... what tends to happen is they don't actually construct the new ideas they think they're constructing... they tend to construct an ersatz version of what they inherited culturally. And in particular, in our society, generally, they tend to assemble sort of a proxy Christianity.
     They would never admit this. Generally, they will argue vigorously against it, but generally they are creating a fake version of Christianity.
     ...what [are the chances] that that's actually going to lead to better outcomes?

Marc Andreesen on Cults
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfqPUM9bxJA

Discussing the book: "The Ancient City" from 1864
The author tried to reconstruct what life was like before the greeks and the romans. His conclusions was, basically: cults.  Civilization was organized into cults, and the intensity of the cults was like a million times stronger than anything we see today.
     There are three levels of cult: family, tribe, and city. Each cult was a joint cult of ancestor gods and nature gods. Your bonding into a tribe or city was based on adherence to that religion. People who were not of your family/tribe/city worshipped other gods, which gave you not only the right but the responsibility to kill them on sight. Zero concept of individual rights. The idea is that they were living under extreme pressure for survival and you could not run around making claim to your individual rights when you were trying to get your tribe through the winter; you needed hardcore command and control. By modern standards those cults were hardcore fascist AND communist.
     Andreesen: My conclusion from this book is: the way we naturally think about the world we live in today is like we basically have such an improved version of everything that came
before us, we have basically we've figured out all these things around morality and ethics and democracy and all these things, and back then they were basically stupid and retrograde and we're like smart sophisticated and we've improved all this. After reading that book uh I now believe in many ways the opposite, which is no, actually we are still running in that original model, we're just running in an incredibly diluted version of it so we're still running basically in cults it's just our cults are at like a thousandth or a millionth the level of intensity.
     Every single person in that era (and he really stresses this), they knew exactly where they stood, they knew exactly where they belonged, they knew exactly what their purpose was, they know exactly what they needed to do every day, they knew exactly why they were doing it, they had total certainty about their place in the universe, so the question of meaning the question of purpose was very distinctly, clearly defined for them: absolutely, overwhelmingly, undisputably, undeniably.