The Burden of Dreams
By Mark Granza · 17 June 2026
On Introspection, Werner Herzog, and the Power of Myth
“For a moment, the feeling crept over me that my work, my vision, is going to destroy me, and for a fleeting moment I let myself take a long, hard look at myself, something I would not otherwise do—out of instinct, on principle, out of self-preservation—look at myself with objective curiosity to see whether my vision has not destroyed me already. I found it comforting to note that I was still breathing.”
— Werner Herzog, ‘Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo’
A woman lies face down on the wall-to-wall carpet of the banquet hall of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, eyes closed, concentrating on her hemorrhoids. Around her, 249 other souls are doing the same with their own private agonies. The trainer has told them to think of the one thing they most wanted to eliminate from their lives and to really feel it—and she is feeling it. Her moan rises to a wail, the wail to a scream, and the scream spreads across the room until there are no longer 250 separate voices but a single collective howl—united, briefly, in the worship of Me. It is an Erhard Seminars Training session in the summer of 1976, and the opening scene of Tom Wolfe’s “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening” essay, published in New York Magazine on August 23, 1976.
Postwar prosperity, Wolfe argued, had handed ordinary Americans a surplus of wealth and enough leisure to do what had once been reserved for aristocrats: turn inward. He traced the turn through the explosion of therapy culture, encounter groups, est seminars, and the self-actualization movements that colonized American life across the ’60s and ’70s. However different on the surface, all of them shared the same underlying premise: the individual self was the primary site of meaning, and of salvation, if salvation was even available.
Wolfe called it the Third Great Awakening, after the religious revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Whereas the previous two had moved outward—the conviction that God was real and that salvation was at stake compelling men to reform institutions, convert the lost, and remake society—this one had turned the same pursuit into a closed loop. The Christian tradition had always prized looking inward, but as a passage rather than a destination: Augustine descends into himself only to find something that points towards God and neighbor. The Me Decade channeled the same emotional intensity into secular retreats, radical self-examination, and a Gnostic sense of ‘breakthrough’. One looks inward and finds only more self, which demands further examination, which yields more self still.
Wolfe was late to his own story. As early as 1966, the sociologist Philip Rieff published The Triumph of the Therapeutic, arguing that every culture worthy of the name survived by what it forbade: the renunciations it demanded of the self in the name of a sacred order. According to Rieff, the therapeutic was the first anti-culture: a way of living organized around no such demand, releasing the self from every communal restraint and installing in their place a single remaining good: the well-being of the individual. The priest, whose office was salvation, gave way to the analyst, whose office was adjustment. “Religious man was born to be saved,” Rieff wrote, “psychological man is born to be pleased.”
Four decades before 250 people lay on the carpet of a banquet hall in Los Angeles, a close cousin of the same revolution was also building in a church basement on Fifth Avenue. In 1932, an ordained minister called Norman Vincent Peale visited a church in New York, found its attendance low and its congregation shrinking, and decided to take it over. His premise was that what people needed from religion was not salvation but confidence. His goal was to fuse Protestant Christianity with the emerging science of psychology. He set up what he called a ‘religio-psychiatric clinic’ in the church basement, offering religion and psychoanalysis side by side. He wanted Christianity to look to science for guidance, and thought of himself as a “scientist of the spiritual life.”
Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, next to his wife, Ruth Stafford Peale.
In 1952, Peale published The Power of Positive Thinking, which sold five million copies in its first decade and has never gone out of print since. Although he was not the source of the American mind-cure tradition that came to be known as New Thought, he made a significant contribution to it. The strands of the modern self-help genre, from Tony Robbins’s motivational empire to Stephen Covey to the law-of-attraction theology that produced Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, run through the same proposition Peale promoted: the primary obstacle between you and the life you want is the quality of your own thinking.
Peale’s influence was recently the subject of an episode of the Nightmare Vision podcast, drawing on Gary Lachman’s Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump. Richard Nixon sought Peale out after the humiliation of 1960, finding in his optimism a philosophy for surviving public failure. Reagan admired him. Donald Trump grew up in his church, absorbed the teaching from childhood, and would later call himself Peale’s greatest student of all time—a claim Peale seemed to bless when, at the 1983 opening of Trump Tower, he predicted that Trump would become “America’s greatest builder.” That same year, Trump told the New York Times, “The mind can overcome any obstacle. I never think of the negative.”
Peale’s vision, in its way, became reality. The gospel of salvation through faith in Christ had been quietly replaced with salvation through faith in ‘self’. But what Wolfe watched on the carpet of the Ambassador Hotel was a further stage still: strip away the Fifth Avenue church, the Presbyterian trappings, the clinic in the basement, and what remained was the self as a project with nothing at the end of it. Peale’s pilgrim still had God waiting at the destination. The est trainer had only more self, moaning on the carpet, having located the source of all its suffering—finding, to its exhilaration, that the source and the solution and the meaning was Me.
***
“I have a deep aversion to too much introspection, to navel-gazing. I’d rather die than go to an analyst, because it’s my view that something fundamentally wrong happens there. If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It’s like that with your soul; if you light it up, shadows and darkness and all, people will become ‘uninhabitable.’ I am convinced that it’s psychoanalysis—along with quite a few other mistakes—that has made the twentieth century so terrible. As far as I’m concerned, the twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake.”
― Werner Herzog, ‘Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir’
Attempting to reassure his crew by swimming in the Amazonian river shortly after a crew member’s toe was taken by a piranha would hardly make a Top 10 list of Werner Herzog’s craziest moments.
Born in Munich in 1942, Herzog spent his early childhood fleeing Allied bombing before being carried by his mother to the remote Bavarian village of Sachrang, where he grew up without running water, a telephone, or any notion that cinema existed. He saw his first film at the age of eleven. By the time he was fourteen, he had decided to become a filmmaker. He financed his first short by working nights at a steel factory and broke into the Munich Film School to steal a camera to shoot it. His entire subsequent career proceeded on the same logic: the rules existed to be broken.
To catalog the legend would take a library. He walked 800 miles from Munich to Paris one winter to visit a dying friend, on the logic that if he made the journey she would survive—sleeping for three weeks under bridges, in barns, in churches, breaking into holiday homes and finishing crossword puzzles left on coffee tables. (She survived another nine years.) He ran a Rogue Film School where students were taught to pick locks, forge filming permits, and, occasionally, cinematography. He strapped himself and his cameraman to the hood of a car on a New York highway and was arrested three times in one hour by the same cop. For one film, he placed an ad asking for actors willing to be hypnotized, tested candidates for susceptibility, hired a professional hypnotist, attended two or three sessions, and then decided he could do it better himself. He then spent three months training a chicken for a thirty-second dance routine—at least the third or fourth chicken he had tried to hypnotize.
“When you’re out in the countryside and you see a chicken, try to look a chicken in the eye with great intensity. And the intensity of stupidity that is looking back at you is just amazing.”
What he ultimately takes part in is something larger than himself, something that exceeds his understanding, a vision that costs him nearly everything and still ends in mystery rather than meaning.
This is all before you get to the films. The self-described ‘clinically sane’ director of Aguirre: the Wrath of God (reviewed here by Lafayette Lee) and Grizzly Man built a cult following over decades thanks to his monologues about nature and chaos delivered with total conviction and not a microgram of irony—the man is simply immune to it—delivered in a slow Bavarian accent that makes even mundane statements sound like prophecy. But what reads as eccentricity is, in nearly every case, a life vow: never to substitute a safe version of the thing for the thing itself.
Of all Herzog’s films, none has been more talked about, documented, or mythologized than Fitzcarraldo (1982). The film follows the true story of an Irish rubber baron in turn-of-the-century Peru who, possessed by a dream of building an opera house in the jungle, devises a plan to reach an inaccessible rubber territory by hauling a 320-ton steamship over a mountain between two rivers. Herzog’s idea to shoot the film, after hearing a friend mention that the real Fitzcarrald had once dragged a steamship across an isthmus, was equally simple: he would build an actual ship and drag it over a real mountain in the Peruvian jungle.
The making of the movie took four years and nearly bankrupted everyone involved. The first camp burned down after Herzog refused to leave when the indigenous council told him to, taking with it one full year of work and every last cent of his savings, without a single second of usable footage. The second camp sat on the border between Peru and Ecuador, two countries on the brink of war. A plane carrying five crew members crashed on takeoff—all seriously injured. A worker drowned in a canoe accident. Another died of a mysterious illness. The lead actor, Klaus Kinski—by then on his fourth collaboration with Herzog—spent his downtime plotting to murder the director, a feeling Herzog reports was entirely mutual. The international press accused Herzog of enslaving indigenous people at gunpoint. His filming permits were forgeries (for a change), signed in his own hand in the name of the President of the Republic, his Secretary of State, and his Chancellor. By the end, Herzog’s shoes had rotted off his feet, leaving him walking the Amazon barefoot.
Werner Herzog on the set of Fitzcarraldo, 1981.
Les Blank documented the entire production in Burden of Dreams. Burden of Dreams is, for all intents and purposes, a film about a man destroying himself in pursuit of a vision he cannot describe. Bags under Herzog’s eyes deepen month after month. By the end, he looks a decade older than when he started. When Blank repeatedly asks why—why the jungle, the ship, why not a model, a studio, or a different film—Herzog can never quite answer, circling the question and always returning to the same odd formulation: “I knew moving a ship over a mountain would be a great metaphor.”
The documentary is worth watching for his monologue halfway through alone, in which an exasperated Herzog somehow makes the most nihilistic statement ever delivered about the natural world sound like poetry. Nature here, he says, is not erotic but obscene: “The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing. They just screech in pain […] It’s a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger […] There is some sort of a harmony—it is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder […] It is not that I hate it. I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment.”
Eventually, after the mountain face cut from sixty degrees to forty and rigged with a system of cables so elaborate that Herzog later claimed he could have moved the ship with his little finger, the 320-ton vessel was dragged inch by inch until it crashed into the Rio Urubamba, looking for one long moment as though it would capsize, before miraculously correcting itself. Yet when Herzog recorded the moment in his diary that evening, he’d write:
“There was no pain, no joy, no excitement, no relief, no happiness, no sound—not even a deep breath. All I grasped was a profound uselessness. Or, to be more precise, I had merely penetrated deeper into its mysterious realm. Today, on Wednesday, the fourth of November, 1981, shortly after twelve noon, we got the ship from the Rio Camisea over a mountain into the Rio Urubamba. All that is to be reported is this: I took part.”
No catharsis, no triumph, no breakthrough. He merely takes part.
***
“It is not only my dreams, my belief is that all these dreams are yours as well.”
― Werner Herzog
Fifty years since Wolfe attended an Erhard Seminars Training session in the summer of 1976, therapeutic language has colonized every domain of public life, from politics and education to relationships and the workplace. It was only a matter of time before the reaction set in.
On March 15, 2026, a clip from David Senra’s podcast went viral, in which venture capitalist Marc Andreessen announced that he practices precisely “zero introspection.” Asked why, Andreessen replied: “To move forward—I find people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past.” Senra, who claims to have read more than four hundred biographies of successful entrepreneurs, observed that almost none of his subjects showed any appetite for introspection. Andreessen agreed, adding that introspection was essentially a Freudian invention—a pathology imported from Vienna sometime around 1910 that serious people had no business indulging.
Since Andreessen’s statements went viral—he would double down several times in the weeks that followed—Herzog has often been invoked as the original enemy of introspection. But his objection to psychoanalysis is not that of a man who avoids his inner life.
Freud’s promise—in direct opposition to Jung, who believed neurosis is the refusal to experience legitimate suffering—was that if you could name the wound and trace it to its origin, you could be freed from it. What he could not account for was the possibility that certain wounds are not wounds at all. Herzog is the enemy of therapy culture insofar as he is more like a living archetype, acting out his obsessions as opposed to attempting to resolve them. The moment you name the obsession, trace it to its origin, and resolve it therapeutically, you have destroyed the very thing that drives you into the jungle.
In a world in which people's lives revolve around making plans, the Werner Herzog model demands something different: a pre-rational commitment made before the outcome, or even purpose, is knowable.
Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto calls for “undertaking the Hero’s Journey, rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community” in the name of rationality. Yet Herzog, who has walked into an active volcano while the surrounding population was being evacuated—who spent his whole life venturing into the unknown—cannot tell you why. His obsession is like that of Joseph Campbell’s retelling of the Arthurian legend in The Power of Myth, in which the knights of the Round Table were told that to begin the quest for the Holy Grail, each must enter the forest at the point that looked darkest to him. To enter where another had already made a path was to follow someone else’s quest.
Figures like Jack Parsons or Elon Musk understand that the ultimate purpose of rationality is to serve irrationality. Parsons, the co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and one of the fathers of American rocketry, grew up reading Arthurian legend and the Arabian Nights before deciding he would build rockets. He then spent his adult life conducting science and occult research with equal seriousness. Musk, who has spoken openly about depression, invested his entire PayPal fortune in rockets against everyone’s advice. His obsession with colonizing Mars, which Herzog has called an elaborate PR tactic designed to sell electric cars, nonetheless mirrors Herzog’s own. The language is rational, but the drive is much older than thought.
Joseph Campbell in the 1988 PBS documentary series The Power of Myth.
Zero introspection undoubtedly points to something real: the Freudian posture of becoming your own analyst, perpetually suspicious of where a feeling or a thought originates, is incompatible with productivity. Taken to its extreme, as Wolfe observed, it can lead to narcissism. The Me Decade never truly ended; the global self-improvement market was worth $45.72 billion in 2024 and is expected to reach $84 billion by 2034. The US self-help industry alone accounts for over $11 billion annually in book sales, with print still outselling digital three to one. But framing productivity philosophy, or “cognitive behavioral therapy,” as the only antidote to therapy culture is a false binary.
The modern figure of The Founder, popularized by Silicon Valley and perhaps best embodied by none other than Andreessen himself, is Peale’s ‘self’ made flesh, at last stripped of its Christian language: a man so optimized, so forward-moving, so devoid of friction that any form of irrationality—the very precondition for the quest for the Grail—registers as a bug in the system. The Hero’s Journey of the Techno-Optimist Manifesto is a quest with no possibility of getting lost, no darkness to overcome, every forest already mapped by someone whose biography is now available online. Following your bliss becomes an exercise in risk management—the last frontier on a pitch deck, the cosmos itself turned into an economic opportunity.
In a world in which people’s lives revolve around making plans, the Werner Herzog model demands something different: a pre-rational commitment made before the outcome, or even purpose, is knowable. What he ultimately takes part in—whether in the Peruvian jungle or at the bottom of the world in Antarctica, like the penguin heading towards certain death in his own Encounters at the End of the World—is something that exceeds his understanding, a vision that costs him nearly everything and still ends in mystery rather than meaning.
“If I abandon this project, I would be a man without dreams… and I don’t want to live like that.”
Herzog’s dream today is the nightmare of the modern world: that our quest for the sacred, or whatever we want to call the thing that makes life worth living, is to be found neither by excavating ourselves nor by refusing ever to look—but by moving through it in the dark, guided by the kind of instinct only a true artist can pursue, with no guarantee of arrival and the willingness to be destroyed in the attempt—comforted throughout by little other than the occasional realization that, despite everything, one is still breathing.
The Burden of Dreams
By Mark Granza · 17 June 2026
On Introspection, Werner Herzog, and the Power of Myth
“For a moment, the feeling crept over me that my work, my vision, is going to destroy me, and for a fleeting moment I let myself take a long, hard look at myself, something I would not otherwise do—out of instinct, on principle, out of self-preservation—look at myself with objective curiosity to see whether my vision has not destroyed me already. I found it comforting to note that I was still breathing.”
— Werner Herzog, ‘Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo’
A woman lies face down on the wall-to-wall carpet of the banquet hall of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, eyes closed, concentrating on her hemorrhoids. Around her, 249 other souls are doing the same with their own private agonies. The trainer has told them to think of the one thing they most wanted to eliminate from their lives and to really feel it—and she is feeling it. Her moan rises to a wail, the wail to a scream, and the scream spreads across the room until there are no longer 250 separate voices but a single collective howl—united, briefly, in the worship of Me. It is an Erhard Seminars Training session in the summer of 1976, and the opening scene of Tom Wolfe’s “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening” essay, published in New York Magazine on August 23, 1976.
Postwar prosperity, Wolfe argued, had handed ordinary Americans a surplus of wealth and enough leisure to do what had once been reserved for aristocrats: turn inward. He traced the turn through the explosion of therapy culture, encounter groups, est seminars, and the self-actualization movements that colonized American life across the ’60s and ’70s. However different on the surface, all of them shared the same underlying premise: the individual self was the primary site of meaning, and of salvation, if salvation was even available.
Wolfe called it the Third Great Awakening, after the religious revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Whereas the previous two had moved outward—the conviction that God was real and that salvation was at stake compelling men to reform institutions, convert the lost, and remake society—this one had turned the same pursuit into a closed loop. The Christian tradition had always prized looking inward, but as a passage rather than a destination: Augustine descends into himself only to find something that points towards God and neighbor. The Me Decade channeled the same emotional intensity into secular retreats, radical self-examination, and a Gnostic sense of ‘breakthrough’. One looks inward and finds only more self, which demands further examination, which yields more self still.
Wolfe was late to his own story. As early as 1966, the sociologist Philip Rieff published The Triumph of the Therapeutic, arguing that every culture worthy of the name survived by what it forbade: the renunciations it demanded of the self in the name of a sacred order. According to Rieff, the therapeutic was the first anti-culture: a way of living organized around no such demand, releasing the self from every communal restraint and installing in their place a single remaining good: the well-being of the individual. The priest, whose office was salvation, gave way to the analyst, whose office was adjustment. “Religious man was born to be saved,” Rieff wrote, “psychological man is born to be pleased.”
Four decades before 250 people lay on the carpet of a banquet hall in Los Angeles, a close cousin of the same revolution was also building in a church basement on Fifth Avenue. In 1932, an ordained minister called Norman Vincent Peale visited a church in New York, found its attendance low and its congregation shrinking, and decided to take it over. His premise was that what people needed from religion was not salvation but confidence. His goal was to fuse Protestant Christianity with the emerging science of psychology. He set up what he called a ‘religio-psychiatric clinic’ in the church basement, offering religion and psychoanalysis side by side. He wanted Christianity to look to science for guidance, and thought of himself as a “scientist of the spiritual life.”
Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, next to his wife, Ruth Stafford Peale.
In 1952, Peale published The Power of Positive Thinking, which sold five million copies in its first decade and has never gone out of print since. Although he was not the source of the American mind-cure tradition that came to be known as New Thought, he made a significant contribution to it. The strands of the modern self-help genre, from Tony Robbins’s motivational empire to Stephen Covey to the law-of-attraction theology that produced Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, run through the same proposition Peale promoted: the primary obstacle between you and the life you want is the quality of your own thinking.
Peale’s influence was recently the subject of an episode of the Nightmare Vision podcast, drawing on Gary Lachman’s Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump. Richard Nixon sought Peale out after the humiliation of 1960, finding in his optimism a philosophy for surviving public failure. Reagan admired him. Donald Trump grew up in his church, absorbed the teaching from childhood, and would later call himself Peale’s greatest student of all time—a claim Peale seemed to bless when, at the 1983 opening of Trump Tower, he predicted that Trump would become “America’s greatest builder.” That same year, Trump told the New York Times, “The mind can overcome any obstacle. I never think of the negative.”
Peale’s vision, in its way, became reality. The gospel of salvation through faith in Christ had been quietly replaced with salvation through faith in ‘self’. But what Wolfe watched on the carpet of the Ambassador Hotel was a further stage still: strip away the Fifth Avenue church, the Presbyterian trappings, the clinic in the basement, and what remained was the self as a project with nothing at the end of it. Peale’s pilgrim still had God waiting at the destination. The est trainer had only more self, moaning on the carpet, having located the source of all its suffering—finding, to its exhilaration, that the source and the solution and the meaning was Me.
***
“I have a deep aversion to too much introspection, to navel-gazing. I’d rather die than go to an analyst, because it’s my view that something fundamentally wrong happens there. If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It’s like that with your soul; if you light it up, shadows and darkness and all, people will become ‘uninhabitable.’ I am convinced that it’s psychoanalysis—along with quite a few other mistakes—that has made the twentieth century so terrible. As far as I’m concerned, the twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake.”
― Werner Herzog, ‘Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir’
Attempting to reassure his crew by swimming in the Amazonian river shortly after a crew member’s toe was taken by a piranha would hardly make a Top 10 list of Werner Herzog’s craziest moments.
Born in Munich in 1942, Herzog spent his early childhood fleeing Allied bombing before being carried by his mother to the remote Bavarian village of Sachrang, where he grew up without running water, a telephone, or any notion that cinema existed. He saw his first film at the age of eleven. By the time he was fourteen, he had decided to become a filmmaker. He financed his first short by working nights at a steel factory and broke into the Munich Film School to steal a camera to shoot it. His entire subsequent career proceeded on the same logic: the rules existed to be broken.
To catalog the legend would take a library. He walked 800 miles from Munich to Paris one winter to visit a dying friend, on the logic that if he made the journey she would survive—sleeping for three weeks under bridges, in barns, in churches, breaking into holiday homes and finishing crossword puzzles left on coffee tables. (She survived another nine years.) He ran a Rogue Film School where students were taught to pick locks, forge filming permits, and, occasionally, cinematography. He strapped himself and his cameraman to the hood of a car on a New York highway and was arrested three times in one hour by the same cop. For one film, he placed an ad asking for actors willing to be hypnotized, tested candidates for susceptibility, hired a professional hypnotist, attended two or three sessions, and then decided he could do it better himself. He then spent three months training a chicken for a thirty-second dance routine—at least the third or fourth chicken he had tried to hypnotize.
“When you’re out in the countryside and you see a chicken, try to look a chicken in the eye with great intensity. And the intensity of stupidity that is looking back at you is just amazing.”
What he ultimately takes part in is something larger than himself, something that exceeds his understanding, a vision that costs him nearly everything and still ends in mystery rather than meaning.
This is all before you get to the films. The self-described ‘clinically sane’ director of Aguirre: the Wrath of God (reviewed here by Lafayette Lee) and Grizzly Man built a cult following over decades thanks to his monologues about nature and chaos delivered with total conviction and not a microgram of irony—the man is simply immune to it—delivered in a slow Bavarian accent that makes even mundane statements sound like prophecy. But what reads as eccentricity is, in nearly every case, a life vow: never to substitute a safe version of the thing for the thing itself.
Of all Herzog’s films, none has been more talked about, documented, or mythologized than Fitzcarraldo (1982). The film follows the true story of an Irish rubber baron in turn-of-the-century Peru who, possessed by a dream of building an opera house in the jungle, devises a plan to reach an inaccessible rubber territory by hauling a 320-ton steamship over a mountain between two rivers. Herzog’s idea to shoot the film, after hearing a friend mention that the real Fitzcarrald had once dragged a steamship across an isthmus, was equally simple: he would build an actual ship and drag it over a real mountain in the Peruvian jungle.
The making of the movie took four years and nearly bankrupted everyone involved. The first camp burned down after Herzog refused to leave when the indigenous council told him to, taking with it one full year of work and every last cent of his savings, without a single second of usable footage. The second camp sat on the border between Peru and Ecuador, two countries on the brink of war. A plane carrying five crew members crashed on takeoff—all seriously injured. A worker drowned in a canoe accident. Another died of a mysterious illness. The lead actor, Klaus Kinski—by then on his fourth collaboration with Herzog—spent his downtime plotting to murder the director, a feeling Herzog reports was entirely mutual. The international press accused Herzog of enslaving indigenous people at gunpoint. His filming permits were forgeries (for a change), signed in his own hand in the name of the President of the Republic, his Secretary of State, and his Chancellor. By the end, Herzog’s shoes had rotted off his feet, leaving him walking the Amazon barefoot.
Werner Herzog on the set of Fitzcarraldo, 1981.
Les Blank documented the entire production in Burden of Dreams. Burden of Dreams is, for all intents and purposes, a film about a man destroying himself in pursuit of a vision he cannot describe. Bags under Herzog’s eyes deepen month after month. By the end, he looks a decade older than when he started. When Blank repeatedly asks why—why the jungle, the ship, why not a model, a studio, or a different film—Herzog can never quite answer, circling the question and always returning to the same odd formulation: “I knew moving a ship over a mountain would be a great metaphor.”
The documentary is worth watching for his monologue halfway through alone, in which an exasperated Herzog somehow makes the most nihilistic statement ever delivered about the natural world sound like poetry. Nature here, he says, is not erotic but obscene: “The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing. They just screech in pain […] It’s a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger […] There is some sort of a harmony—it is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder […] It is not that I hate it. I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment.”
Eventually, after the mountain face cut from sixty degrees to forty and rigged with a system of cables so elaborate that Herzog later claimed he could have moved the ship with his little finger, the 320-ton vessel was dragged inch by inch until it crashed into the Rio Urubamba, looking for one long moment as though it would capsize, before miraculously correcting itself. Yet when Herzog recorded the moment in his diary that evening, he’d write:
“There was no pain, no joy, no excitement, no relief, no happiness, no sound—not even a deep breath. All I grasped was a profound uselessness. Or, to be more precise, I had merely penetrated deeper into its mysterious realm. Today, on Wednesday, the fourth of November, 1981, shortly after twelve noon, we got the ship from the Rio Camisea over a mountain into the Rio Urubamba. All that is to be reported is this: I took part.”
No catharsis, no triumph, no breakthrough. He merely takes part.
***
“It is not only my dreams, my belief is that all these dreams are yours as well.”
― Werner Herzog
Fifty years since Wolfe attended an Erhard Seminars Training session in the summer of 1976, therapeutic language has colonized every domain of public life, from politics and education to relationships and the workplace. It was only a matter of time before the reaction set in.
On March 15, 2026, a clip from David Senra’s podcast went viral, in which venture capitalist Marc Andreessen announced that he practices precisely “zero introspection.” Asked why, Andreessen replied: “To move forward—I find people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past.” Senra, who claims to have read more than four hundred biographies of successful entrepreneurs, observed that almost none of his subjects showed any appetite for introspection. Andreessen agreed, adding that introspection was essentially a Freudian invention—a pathology imported from Vienna sometime around 1910 that serious people had no business indulging.
Since Andreessen’s statements went viral—he would double down several times in the weeks that followed—Herzog has often been invoked as the original enemy of introspection. But his objection to psychoanalysis is not that of a man who avoids his inner life.
Freud’s promise—in direct opposition to Jung, who believed neurosis is the refusal to experience legitimate suffering—was that if you could name the wound and trace it to its origin, you could be freed from it. What he could not account for was the possibility that certain wounds are not wounds at all. Herzog is the enemy of therapy culture insofar as he is more like a living archetype, acting out his obsessions as opposed to attempting to resolve them. The moment you name the obsession, trace it to its origin, and resolve it therapeutically, you have destroyed the very thing that drives you into the jungle.
In a world in which people's lives revolve around making plans, the Werner Herzog model demands something different: a pre-rational commitment made before the outcome, or even purpose, is knowable.
Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto calls for “undertaking the Hero’s Journey, rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community” in the name of rationality. Yet Herzog, who has walked into an active volcano while the surrounding population was being evacuated—who spent his whole life venturing into the unknown—cannot tell you why. His obsession is like that of Joseph Campbell’s retelling of the Arthurian legend in The Power of Myth, in which the knights of the Round Table were told that to begin the quest for the Holy Grail, each must enter the forest at the point that looked darkest to him. To enter where another had already made a path was to follow someone else’s quest.
Figures like Jack Parsons or Elon Musk understand that the ultimate purpose of rationality is to serve irrationality. Parsons, the co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and one of the fathers of American rocketry, grew up reading Arthurian legend and the Arabian Nights before deciding he would build rockets. He then spent his adult life conducting science and occult research with equal seriousness. Musk, who has spoken openly about depression, invested his entire PayPal fortune in rockets against everyone’s advice. His obsession with colonizing Mars, which Herzog has called an elaborate PR tactic designed to sell electric cars, nonetheless mirrors Herzog’s own. The language is rational, but the drive is much older than thought.
Joseph Campbell in the 1988 PBS documentary series The Power of Myth.
Zero introspection undoubtedly points to something real: the Freudian posture of becoming your own analyst, perpetually suspicious of where a feeling or a thought originates, is incompatible with productivity. Taken to its extreme, as Wolfe observed, it can lead to narcissism. The Me Decade never truly ended; the global self-improvement market was worth $45.72 billion in 2024 and is expected to reach $84 billion by 2034. The US self-help industry alone accounts for over $11 billion annually in book sales, with print still outselling digital three to one. But framing productivity philosophy, or “cognitive behavioral therapy,” as the only antidote to therapy culture is a false binary.
The modern figure of The Founder, popularized by Silicon Valley and perhaps best embodied by none other than Andreessen himself, is Peale’s self made flesh, at last stripped of its Christian language: a man so optimized, so forward-moving, so devoid of friction that any form of irrationality—the very precondition for the quest for the Grail—registers as a bug in the system. The Hero’s Journey of the Techno-Optimist Manifesto is a quest with no possibility of getting lost, no darkness to overcome, every forest already mapped by someone whose biography is now available online. Following your bliss becomes an exercise in risk management—the last frontier on a pitch deck, the cosmos itself turned into an economic opportunity.
In a world in which people’s lives revolve around making plans, the Werner Herzog model demands something different: a pre-rational commitment made before the outcome, or even purpose, is knowable. What he ultimately takes part in—whether in the Peruvian jungle or at the bottom of the world in Antarctica, like the penguin heading towards certain death in his own Encounters at the End of the World—is something that exceeds his understanding, a vision that costs him nearly everything and still ends in mystery rather than meaning.
“If I abandon this project, I would be a man without dreams… and I don’t want to live like that.”
Herzog’s dream today is the nightmare of the modern world: that our quest for the sacred, or whatever we want to call the thing that makes life worth living, is to be found neither by excavating ourselves nor by refusing ever to look—but by moving through it in the dark, guided by the kind of instinct only a true artist can pursue, with no guarantee of arrival and the willingness to be destroyed in the attempt—comforted throughout by little other than the occasional realization that, despite everything, one is still breathing.
