Zero Introspection

“You don’t have any levels of introspection?” “Yes, zero, as little as possible . . . the great men of history didn’t sit around doing this stuff.” Marc Andreessen smirked as he delivered his views on the uselessness of ethical reflection and derided the gullible who participate in it.

The newly released interview with Andreessen is wrought with both subtle and belligerent assaults on the value of introspection and related ethical principles—principles derived from a rich tradition of thinkers willing to grapple with the most difficult moral and political questions of their respective eras.

Ironically, these very principles—pluralism, free markets, human rights—have served as the bedrock of the America that allowed Andreessen and his friends, through a mix of luck and effort, to amass such wealth and power.

The rejection of introspection and moral duties to others, combined with an unwillingness to defend the very system that incubated their success, is a baffling and deeply troubling trend—one which extends far beyond Andreessen.

“You didn’t do a very good job making the world a better place.” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s frustration with the “Davos elite” flashed briefly near the end of his WEF interview with The Economist’s Editor-in-Chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, prompted by her observation that Dimon refused to say a critical word about Donald Trump and his policies.

It was a tense moment. Here was Dimon, self-proclaimed globalist and a Davos man if there ever was one, facing the fact that the principles that make his life and work possible are eroding before his eyes. But he was having trouble saying so.

Toward the interview’s conclusion, Minton Beddoes pushed Dimon when she asked whether there is a “climate of fear” among America’s CEOs. Dimon responded by reiterating his support for a stronger NATO, a stronger Europe, and a changed approach to immigration without finding fault with Trump directly. “There, I said it,” he said, looking to the crowd for approval. “What the hell else do you want me to say?”

Citadel CEO Ken Griffin followed a similar line in his interview with Minton Beddoes, albeit more calmly. One by one, he opposed the Trump policies on tariffs, immigration, and crony capitalism, and the administration’s attacks on institutions (notably, the independence of the Federal Reserve). And yet, Griffin insisted on effusive praise of Trump for his projection of American power—opining that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine might not have happened under Trump and explaining threats on Greenland as the ramblings of an otherwise benign real estate developer used to tough transactions. In the most animated moment of the interview, Griffin energetically expressed the strongest reason for his support of Trump: the deregulation of U.S. businesses.

What could matter more than deregulation to American business leaders?

In ordinary times, this would be a legitimate question of give and take. But today, it takes willful blindness to overlook the rupture of our political and social order so skillfully described by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and personified by President Trump in his norm-shattering ways.

It ought to be self-evident that the moral rupture of the moment should outweigh the sugar high of deregulation. But it hasn’t. And at some level, Griffin, Andreessen, Dimon, and other CEOs know it. Perhaps this explains their crankiness and feigned outrage when pressed.

Overwhelmed and intimidated, America’s most influential business leaders refuse to acknowledge that Trump is using the office of the presidency to enrich himself and his family and to levy the full force of the federal government to pressure law firms, media companies, universities, and civic organizations to do his bidding.

Instead, business leaders are putting their heads in the sand and wrapping themselves in a new cloak of moral justification: the rejection of wokeness, the preservation of the “West,” and the age-old trope that the ends of innovation justify the means, no matter the human cost.

The damage to the social and political order is incalculable, and it is remarkable to observe the distance traveled from a few short years ago when CEOs preached corporate social responsibility.

In January 2018, Larry Fink made headlines with his corporate governance letter “A Sense of Purpose,” admonishing leaders to think beyond the bottom line—to consider “making a positive contribution to society.” Years of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies followed and persisted until the Trump administration insisted on their dismantling. As late as 2022, Fink was arguing that “stakeholder capitalism” required looking out for the interests of the community in addition to the imperative of making money for shareholders.

Now, in 2026, Fink uses his positions, such as co-chair of Davos, to emphasize the threat of AI and to platform Elon Musk, refusing to engage in any uncomfortable conversations tethered to the real world about Musk’s role in massive cuts to the U.S. government and the consequences for Americans and others around the world who relied on such programs.

The ledger is clear, and the sane-washing of Trump by CEOs and their pivot back to innovation-at-all-cost “morality” will go down in U.S. history as a shameful episode.

Not only have most CEOs not spoken up, but they also insist on praising Trump when possible. The CEO dinner at the White House in September 2025 was the nadir, when Apple CEO Tim Cook said, “thank you” to President Trump nine times in two minutes. Cook recently tried to sanitize the record, arguing, "What I do is I interact on policy, not politics. I'm not a political person on either side. I'm not political." Cook’s excuse rings hollow: a master of the universe in all areas except when courage is required and there is a potential personal cost to bear.

How do we explain this moral bankruptcy? It’s not complicated, as business leaders always have an interest in going along to get along. Yet the stakes feel different now.

Prime Minister Carney’s Davos speech got to the heart of the matter in its very structure—taking as its framework Vaclav Havel’s 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless.” Havel points out that we all live within complex systems often requiring subservience and conformity. This is felt most acutely in authoritarian regimes, where power is unrestrained.

To survive, we often must live “within a lie.” As Carney explains, “the system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone's willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes from the same source.”

How does a climate of fear and submission end? Carney put it clearly, “When even one person stops performing . . . the illusion begins to crack.”

And so, we wait for the tide to turn, as it inevitably will. One would think that America’s titans of industry and finance would know this in their bones and try to anticipate the cycle. But as of now, they are more than willing to absorb the costs of their moral relativism.

Courage is the antidote to fear. Aristotle considered courage to be the cardinal virtue as it is the one virtue that guarantees all the others. Without courage, we can expect more self-censorship and obsequious flattery from CEOs, until the moment when, as the story goes, it is revealed that the emperor has no clothes.