I agree. I've been working in Silicon Valley for a few years now, and it honestly feels like a page out of Animal Farm. The Orwellian mismatch between rhetoric and action feels like cult-like propaganda to me.
I don't know how veterans of the Valley can keep this up.
Of course, marketing sometimes goes a bit over the board, and each release of version 8.4 is the best thing that happened to humanity since v8.3 was released and before it's time to release v8.5. But that's kind of expected, nobody I know takes it as a literal truth.
And of course there are mission statements that talk about improving human condition and expanding horizons and saving the world. Sometimes it happens, at least to a measure, sometimes it doesn't, but that's not usually what you're thinking the whole day about, and even not something you think about every week or every month.
And of course (almost) each startup CEO thinks his (or her) startup is going to change the world, or at least some part of it. That's how you should think if you're getting into a startup, otherwise it's not worth the trouble, the stress and the extremely high chance of failure. Of course the CEO believes she (or he) found some special thing nobody thought of before and some unique vision nobody had before - otherwise how the startup could take off the ground at all?
And really, describing giving up free gym, yoga class and cafeteria as "something horrible happening to you"... I can't even find adequate words to describe how wrong this is.
I've been in SV for 15 years, and one (out of four) companies has been incredibly cult-like. The exec team, and CEO in particular, often espoused how we were going to change the world of $INDUSTRY forever. Any talk of existential problems was met with accusations of disloyalty. People who were even thinking about leaving or interviewing elsewhere were viewed as disloyal and got "the talk" from the CEO or CTO.