I would be wary of anyone who likes to boast that they "studied under" Habermas (or any other famous intellectual). Habermas was already famous by the late sixties and had a very long career after that, so it makes sense that several generations of ambitious young intellectuals would try to vie for his attention. By all accounts, he was quite selective with his advisees; he mentions in a 2022 interview that in his whole career, he "barely had more than a dozen doctoral students." Those outside this immediate orbit would like to consider themselves his bastards, but a bastard has a more than incidental relation to the father, and I'm not sure that such is the case here.
I'm grateful for your comment. I've wondered about this from the time I took a job at Palantir in 2008. Let me say, in my defense, that I had (and could not have had, living so far from Silicon Valley) no idea of Silicon Valley's "intellectual" metastasis since the time I'd worked there. The name of Peter Thiel meant absolutely nothing to me. The last stage in the interview process was an interview with Karp, and a biography of Max Weber was prominently lying on the coffee table between us. It took me a long time to figure out that this was all for show. I didn't understand the true Karp until long after I left. I couldn't stand to be in the same room with creeps like Joe Lonsdale, let alone Thiel, but it all makes sense now. I wonder, based on your comment, if Karp is like Steve Bannon: a smart guy in a profession that requires intelligence, but just not as smart as the other guys, and now with a chance to exercise his resentment and stick it to them. I was horrified when Karp, giggling (his nerd-out-of-water schtick), during an all-hands meeting (in other words, while addressing 1500 or more employees), praised the torture of Abu Zubaydah. He had not yet gotten around to assisting the IDF in its depopulation of Gaza.
Do we know each other? I also worked at Palantir in 2008. You have a clear picture of Karp. I often get asked about his antics by those who were not there, and when I explain that it is all an act, a deliberate performance, they refuse to believe it. The clownish character is easier to believe in than the persona of an actor. The only "business book" I was required to read in that job was a classic work on improv theater. For Karp, discourse is not meaningful but a smokescreen for the true objective, power.
John this is brilliant. The analogy (metonymy?) between state and individual meaning that the state can indeed purify society and expel what threatens individual ownership or conversely since private property is the raison d’etre for the state the wealth owners must control it. I think maybe this is a sleight of hand. I found Habermas to be a very mixed person, at first supportive and then narcissistically injured by my friendly in spirit feminist criticism. However I also experienced him at the height of his conflict with the student movement when he was quite angry—any form of thought or action that hearkened back to irrationalism did frighten him. The authoritarian reaction to the students was forgivable and ultimately forgiven, but I think led to a kind of purging in the ranks of social thought and philosophy, and the dominance only of people who agreed with him. Anyone with a playful mind would have to turn to the French and go elsewhere (Berlin for instance).
I think you're misreading Karp's "theater of discourse" quote. To me, it says that progressive theorizing on the status of Karp's "underclass" has ignored the actual well-being of that underclass. There is a grain of truth to that. Progressive discourse indeed tends to overemphasize abstract rights of oppressed people at the expense of their concrete welfare. It also tends to overly focus on the plight of the least oppressed of the oppressed people. Sometimes, I think that the amount of kvetching about glass ceilings far exceeds the kvetching about the lack of publicly-funded childcare.
Came here to say this. I read that quote as at least compatible with left (materialist) critiques of identitarianism, e.g., Terry Eagleton’s analysis in After Theory. FWIW, I have no sympathy for Karp, and I really love where JG goes in this piece w/r/t idealism and sovereignty.
I remember the discourse about really, really understanding Althusser or whomever as pretty "theatrical." The implicit promise (sometimes more than implicit) was that these words would become a lever to effect the most radical (and "radical" was only ever used positively; that reactionary radicalism was possible was never considered) possible change.
"A member of the human race who is completely incapable of understanding the higher productivity of labor performed under a division of labor based on private property is not properly speaking a person" but just an unhumanized animal.
As an anthropology, this is almost as fascinating as it is horrifying. Does it mean homo sapiens were just one more species of primate until 18th or 19th-century capitalism restaged creation, and Adam and Eve were finally born? And even then, animals who couldn't "understand" lived and labored among the humans?
"Habermas's Bastards" - "low-key becoming a nazi" - you are killing me - but seriously your discussion on karp's hubris and contradictions - and the influences on yarvin - so illuminating (and very disturbing) - just goes to show you - ideas really matter
Hoppe recapitulates the Stirner -> Stürmer pipeline.
By synchronicity I was re-reading an article ("How liberalism became 'the god that failed' in eastern Europe") from 2019 today, which had this great Habermas quote in it:
<< Germany’s foremost philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, warmly welcomed “the lack of ideas that are either innovative or oriented towards the future” after 1989, since for him the central and eastern European revolutions were “rectifying revolutions” or “catch-up revolutions”. Their goal was to enable central and eastern European societies to gain what the western Europeans already possessed.>>
Which for me are an elegant statement of the key characteristic of liberalism's meta-temporal narrative - the lack of any telos. There is a 'where we were' (worse), a 'where we are now' (better) and a general progressive aspiration for 'where we are going' (things can only get better - unless something bad happens...). But otherwise its just the Oasis song "I'm free to do whatever I want...", forever. This, imho, is the ideological projection of the true telos of capitalist society - the blind self-valorisation of capital, that brooks no other goals or even history.
This lack of a telos can be liberating, in one light. But on the other hand, when the arc of history seems to be bending the wrong way, people start casting around for alternative ideologies that have a sense of the collective with a horizon for a collective destination (socialism, fascism, you name it). This, ultimately, is why there's a libertarian -> fascism pipeline because even though the former tries to substitute a sadistic reification of capitalism for aimless liberalism, in the end it still suffers from the lack of community and purpose ideologies further to the right provide.
I would be wary of anyone who likes to boast that they "studied under" Habermas (or any other famous intellectual). Habermas was already famous by the late sixties and had a very long career after that, so it makes sense that several generations of ambitious young intellectuals would try to vie for his attention. By all accounts, he was quite selective with his advisees; he mentions in a 2022 interview that in his whole career, he "barely had more than a dozen doctoral students." Those outside this immediate orbit would like to consider themselves his bastards, but a bastard has a more than incidental relation to the father, and I'm not sure that such is the case here.
I'm grateful for your comment. I've wondered about this from the time I took a job at Palantir in 2008. Let me say, in my defense, that I had (and could not have had, living so far from Silicon Valley) no idea of Silicon Valley's "intellectual" metastasis since the time I'd worked there. The name of Peter Thiel meant absolutely nothing to me. The last stage in the interview process was an interview with Karp, and a biography of Max Weber was prominently lying on the coffee table between us. It took me a long time to figure out that this was all for show. I didn't understand the true Karp until long after I left. I couldn't stand to be in the same room with creeps like Joe Lonsdale, let alone Thiel, but it all makes sense now. I wonder, based on your comment, if Karp is like Steve Bannon: a smart guy in a profession that requires intelligence, but just not as smart as the other guys, and now with a chance to exercise his resentment and stick it to them. I was horrified when Karp, giggling (his nerd-out-of-water schtick), during an all-hands meeting (in other words, while addressing 1500 or more employees), praised the torture of Abu Zubaydah. He had not yet gotten around to assisting the IDF in its depopulation of Gaza.
Do we know each other? I also worked at Palantir in 2008. You have a clear picture of Karp. I often get asked about his antics by those who were not there, and when I explain that it is all an act, a deliberate performance, they refuse to believe it. The clownish character is easier to believe in than the persona of an actor. The only "business book" I was required to read in that job was a classic work on improv theater. For Karp, discourse is not meaningful but a smokescreen for the true objective, power.
We almost certainly know each other. I don't want to be identifiable to them, though I might already be, so let's communicate over another channel.
John this is brilliant. The analogy (metonymy?) between state and individual meaning that the state can indeed purify society and expel what threatens individual ownership or conversely since private property is the raison d’etre for the state the wealth owners must control it. I think maybe this is a sleight of hand. I found Habermas to be a very mixed person, at first supportive and then narcissistically injured by my friendly in spirit feminist criticism. However I also experienced him at the height of his conflict with the student movement when he was quite angry—any form of thought or action that hearkened back to irrationalism did frighten him. The authoritarian reaction to the students was forgivable and ultimately forgiven, but I think led to a kind of purging in the ranks of social thought and philosophy, and the dominance only of people who agreed with him. Anyone with a playful mind would have to turn to the French and go elsewhere (Berlin for instance).
I think you're misreading Karp's "theater of discourse" quote. To me, it says that progressive theorizing on the status of Karp's "underclass" has ignored the actual well-being of that underclass. There is a grain of truth to that. Progressive discourse indeed tends to overemphasize abstract rights of oppressed people at the expense of their concrete welfare. It also tends to overly focus on the plight of the least oppressed of the oppressed people. Sometimes, I think that the amount of kvetching about glass ceilings far exceeds the kvetching about the lack of publicly-funded childcare.
Came here to say this. I read that quote as at least compatible with left (materialist) critiques of identitarianism, e.g., Terry Eagleton’s analysis in After Theory. FWIW, I have no sympathy for Karp, and I really love where JG goes in this piece w/r/t idealism and sovereignty.
Maybe you’re right
I remember the discourse about really, really understanding Althusser or whomever as pretty "theatrical." The implicit promise (sometimes more than implicit) was that these words would become a lever to effect the most radical (and "radical" was only ever used positively; that reactionary radicalism was possible was never considered) possible change.
"A member of the human race who is completely incapable of understanding the higher productivity of labor performed under a division of labor based on private property is not properly speaking a person" but just an unhumanized animal.
As an anthropology, this is almost as fascinating as it is horrifying. Does it mean homo sapiens were just one more species of primate until 18th or 19th-century capitalism restaged creation, and Adam and Eve were finally born? And even then, animals who couldn't "understand" lived and labored among the humans?
"Habermas's Bastards" - "low-key becoming a nazi" - you are killing me - but seriously your discussion on karp's hubris and contradictions - and the influences on yarvin - so illuminating (and very disturbing) - just goes to show you - ideas really matter
Hoppe recapitulates the Stirner -> Stürmer pipeline.
By synchronicity I was re-reading an article ("How liberalism became 'the god that failed' in eastern Europe") from 2019 today, which had this great Habermas quote in it:
<< Germany’s foremost philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, warmly welcomed “the lack of ideas that are either innovative or oriented towards the future” after 1989, since for him the central and eastern European revolutions were “rectifying revolutions” or “catch-up revolutions”. Their goal was to enable central and eastern European societies to gain what the western Europeans already possessed.>>
Which for me are an elegant statement of the key characteristic of liberalism's meta-temporal narrative - the lack of any telos. There is a 'where we were' (worse), a 'where we are now' (better) and a general progressive aspiration for 'where we are going' (things can only get better - unless something bad happens...). But otherwise its just the Oasis song "I'm free to do whatever I want...", forever. This, imho, is the ideological projection of the true telos of capitalist society - the blind self-valorisation of capital, that brooks no other goals or even history.
This lack of a telos can be liberating, in one light. But on the other hand, when the arc of history seems to be bending the wrong way, people start casting around for alternative ideologies that have a sense of the collective with a horizon for a collective destination (socialism, fascism, you name it). This, ultimately, is why there's a libertarian -> fascism pipeline because even though the former tries to substitute a sadistic reification of capitalism for aimless liberalism, in the end it still suffers from the lack of community and purpose ideologies further to the right provide.