Like all young boys who have fallen in love with Ayn Rand, Peter Thiel started out as a newly-washed libertarian, “and I have remained true to the convictions of my teenage years, true to authentic human freedom as a prerequisite for the highest good,” he says in a biographical article, and he therefore remains against “confiscating taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of each individual,” he assures.
- INSERT: If you wonder about the latter, Peter Thiel is VERY concerned with his own mortality and has invested large sums in initiatives such as the Methuselah Foundation and the SENS Research Foundation, which are working with artificial intelligence to find solutions to slow down or reverse the aging process.
And Thiel really believes that eternal life awaits us thanks to the development of artificial intelligence. Until the breakthrough comes, however, he has just twelve days to be on the safe side! - has obtained New Zealand citizenship so he can build a large, luxurious 'Doomsday Prepper' complex in a remote wilderness area on New Zealand's South Island. But of course, the project has been blocked by some eco-activists for the time being.
BUT, BUT, BUT, Thiel continues, "I must admit that over the past two decades I have radically changed my mind about how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."
Ugh! But that's what happens when you hang out with Curtis Yarvin and the dark elves too much.
“The higher your IQ, the more pessimistic you became about free-market politics—capitalism is simply not that popular with the masses,” Thiel says, adding, “The 1920s were the last decade in American history when you could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the massive increase in welfare recipients and the expansion of the vote to women—two constituencies notoriously tough on libertarians—have made the concept of ‘capitalist democracy’ a contradiction in terms.”
Yes, it’s not easy being a signature geek and a libertarian, but Thiel doesn’t despair:
“I don’t despair because I no longer believe that politics is the way forward… [because] unlike in the political world, in the world of technology, individual choice can still be all-important. The fate of our world may depend on the efforts of a single person building or expanding the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.”
And this Wagnerian Parsifal behavior Thiel then embarks on.
But why does Thiel no longer believe in politics? Well, the moment of clarity, the TURNING POINT, came, according to Thiel, when the rational world collapsed with the towers on September 11, 2001, “where a very small number of people were able to inflict unprecedented levels of damage and death” and thus demonstrated that a few fanatics can overthrow our Western civilization.
In a lecture he gave in his ‘Computer Science 183: Startup’ course, when he was an early teacher at Stanford, Thiel called the turning point a Strauss moment, which is very well chosen, since you can both hear the Strauss fanfare – dae-dae-dae-da-da – and see the killer monkey throw the bone into the air and become a human.
“The awareness of the West’s vulnerability demanded a new compromise,” he says, “and this new compromise inexorably demanded more security at the expense of freedom.”
Of course, that goes without saying. But it also required a total reassessment of the ideas about man that were born with the Enlightenment's belief in human reason, human progress, and society as a rational contract between free individuals, as taught by John Locke, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant.
Like the Enlightenment thinkers of the time, in their optimism they had forgotten the question of the true and universal nature of man and society, which the thinkers of antiquity had never let go of.
Thiel derives the true nature of man and society from his admired French teacher at Stanford, René Girard, and his mimetic theory of society, which briefly states that man is by nature imitative and has a desire to resemble others, which leads to jealousy and violence that can ultimately only be controlled by the group choosing a scapegoat to kill.
Thiel describes the theory this way:
“Murder is the secret origin of all religious and political institutions, and is remembered and transformed in the form of myth. The scapegoat, perceived as the primary source of conflict and disorder, had to die in order for there to be peace. By violence, violence was brought to an end, and society was born. But because society rests on the belief in its own order and justice, the basic act of violence must be concealed—by the myth that the murdered victim was really guilty. Thus, violence is embedded in the heart of society; myth is merely a discourse that is fleeting in relation to violence. Myth sanctifies violence in the basic murder: myth tells us that the violence was justified because the victim was really guilty and, at least in the context of archaic cultures, really powerful. Myths transform the murdered scapegoats into gods, and religious rituals reenact the basic murder through the sacrifice of human or animal substitutes, thereby creating a kind of peace that always mixed with a certain amount of violence. The central role of sacrifice was so great that those who managed to postpone or avoid execution became objects of veneration. Every king is a kind of living god, and therein lies the true origin of monarchy.”
Some will probably scratch their heads and say, what a bunch of nonsense, but I bring the long quote here in order to be able to give an instructive warning.
The understanding we have of the origin and nature of man and society, which we have inherited from the Enlightenment and its aftermath, be it from Adam Smith or Karl Marx, is, if not grossly wrong, then at least completely inadequate, and it does not help to supplement it with Darwin's natural selection.
Sigmund Freud is right when he says that one must delve deep into the archaic past world, from which the human mind and religious myths come, to find the true nature and origin of man and society. Which is not to say that Freud is right in his theory of parricide, which, incidentally, is not so much reminiscent of Girard's.
This does not mean that the secret of man is religious, it can of course only be material and biological; it is the secret of religiosity that is human, as Ludwig Feuerbach famously pointed out. The secret of humanity, on the other hand, is so profound that up to now we have had myths to work with.
(To be fair, Marx himself discovered this while reading in the library of the British Museum, abruptly stopped writing further on the second and third volumes of Capital and began extensive ethnological studies, but just as he had made a good start, he died.)
This is not to say that Girard is right with his Lord of the Flies-like theory, but that one is only fooling oneself if one simply rejects archaic material instead of showing it the respect it truly deserves.
The fall of the towers showed precisely to Peter Thiel that we have not shown archaic material the respect it deserves. We have far overestimated the intellectual side of human nature, which emphasizes rationality and order, and forgotten the side of deep instincts and emotions, which breeds anarchy and chaos.
In ancient times, people were very aware of the opposition between these sides and worked with them in the form of the myths of the orderly Apollo and the disorderly Dionysus. Later, scholars – and therefore Thiel in his teaching – used the conceptual pair Athens and Jerusalem when they had to talk about the opposition between intellect and emotion, knowledge and faith, realization and revelation. One could therefore perhaps say that because Athens in our time has ignored Jerusalem, Jerusalem fought back and overthrew the towers. (Some conspiracy theorists would say - literally.)
To support his now gloomy and pessimistic view of human nature, Thiel also includes Carl Schmitt, the Nazi legal philosopher from the Third Reich, whom all political science courses are so enthusiastic about because he comes up with a simple and easy-to-understand definition of the political.
Politics is essentially about the friend-enemy distinction and about constantly designating an enemy, says Carl Schmitt, which aligns very well with Girard and, unfortunately, also with our experiences from our own political reality.
But Carl Schmitt has another famous theory that points to a kind of solution. He says that sovereignty lies with the one who can declare a ceasefire; and that the sovereign – the ruler – as above politics, has the right to make sovereign decisions outside of politics, autocratically outside of democracy.
Here one naturally thinks of the Hitler era, when Der Führer, as the sovereign, maintained a ceasefire between the always rival and warring factions of his movement and issued sovereign decisions, which the legal philosopher Schmitt then legitimized with his highly learned writings.
But then you also think about our own reality, where the hostility is now spreading in all directions like an uncontrollable wildfire, and where Donald Trump is trying to enforce power as sovereign by dictating a ceasefire, for the time being in vain, and the whole thing is becoming more and more chaotic, while poor Professor Jeffrey Sachs, the lone voice of reason, flies around from TV screen to TV screen like an increasingly desperate Apollo.
Niels, you're rambling, aren't you done soon?
Yes, yes, I'll stop now; you've had your hand up for a long time, would you like to say something?
Yes, the Strauss that Thiel is talking about is not the Nietzsche - and Also Sprach Zarathustra - Strauss who made the music for Stanley Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey and for the fanfare where the monkey swung the bone.
Isn't that right?
No, the one Thiel is talking about is the philosopher Leo Strauss, not the composer Richard Strauss.
Leo?
Yes, Leo Strauss.
Argh!
And my hand starts shaking...
