Reading Thiel's Op-Ed

An Esoteric Look

Last week, tech magnate Peter Thiel wrote an op-ed for the Financial Times entitled “A time for truth and reconciliation.” It garnered a lot of attention but almost universal stupefaction: What the hell is he talking about? Is this the ravings of the lunatic? The tedious bloviations of a pretentious wind-bag? Or, the gnomic utterances of a true visionary? It’s a text that requires a little interpretation—or the decision that it’s not worth interpreting at all. At the risk of reading too much into it, I’m going to assume it does signify something, and that, either consciously or unconsciously, Thiel wrote something that has multiple levels of meaning. In other words, I will attempt something like a Straussian reading of the text.

The political philosopher Leo Strauss, whom I know Thiel is familiar with, believed that great thinkers deliberately encode esoteric meanings to hide what can’t be said publicly from the rulers and the hoi polloi. It pains me to do this because there is probably nothing more gratifying to Thiel’s ego than the idea that he was successfully being cryptic and now his text is being searched for hidden meaning. But, by virtue of his wealth, and proximity to Vance and Trump, he’s one of the most powerful people on earth, so his words are “newsworthy.” I’ll attempt to provide “generous” interpretations of overt intent but I’ll also apply what I think is a warranted “hermeneutics of suspicion.”

What emerges on close reading is a relatively coherent worldview and philosophy of governing, consonant with Thiel’s intellectual preoccupations and statements in the past and giving some clear evidence of his political desires. Let’s start with the theis, as it were:

In 2016, President Barack Obama told his staff that Donald Trump’s election victory was “not the apocalypse”. By any definition, he was correct. But understood in the original sense of the Greek word apokálypsis, meaning “unveiling”, Obama could not give the same reassurance in 2025. Trump’s return to the White House augurs the apokálypsis of the ancien regime’s secrets. The new administration’s revelations need not justify vengeance — reconstruction can go hand in hand with reconciliation. But for reconciliation to take place, there must first be truth.

Sounds a little menacing and then a little reassuring—apocalypse, ancien regime, reconstruction—words associated with end times and revolution—and then the notion of “reconciliation.” This combination of threat and softening, an extreme vision and a more palatable one, is characteristic of Thiel’s public statements. See, for example, his post-9/11 essay “The Straussian Moment” where he presents two radical and violent possibilities for the future, signified by Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, and then presents his own, based on the thought of Réne Girard, as a kind of compromise, a moderate solution. Thiel is a businessman, of course: a negotiation is opened with the reader. An offer we can’t refuse?

What’s clear is that he thinks the present situation is revolutionary. The previous administration is not just a previous administration, it is another regime, he calls it the ancien regime, calling forth pre-revolutionary France. So, this is the French Revolution and the apocalypse, rolled into one. Overegging the pudding of metaphors? Well, perhaps. But here we have to talk about René Girard: Thiel’s maître. For Girard, all history is revelation, a series of apocalypses. The secret of mankind is conflict and violence: the only thing that keeps violence that comes from our “mimetic rivalries,” our envy and desires for each other’s desires, from spiraling out of control is religion. Sacrificial religion focused violence on a scapegoat who would relieve the pressures of mimetic rivalry in an ancient society. But Christianity breaks the scapegoat mechanism, as it were, by revealing the total innocence of the victim: the old myths no longer work, no one believes anymore. This creates a problem: without a scapegoat mechanism, violence can once again spiral totally out of control, and humanity can destroy itself. This is what Girard calls an apocalyptic situation. (Note the word mechanism: for Thiel, Christianity is here understood as a structure, a framework, deterministic, an algorithm: this is the Christ of the Engineers.)

Thiel writes, “The new administration’s revelations need not justify vengeance.” Need not. Not “does not.” Could — Could justify violence. Perhaps does? Another threat? The alternative is “reconciliation,” Christian repentance and forgiveness. Thiel always offers a vision of fascist violence and then says, “But, me, I’m a Christian. I forgive.” He’s offering us a peaceful solution, which is to reveal “the truth:”

The apokálypsis is the most peaceful means of resolving the old guard’s war on the internet, a war the internet won. My friend and colleague Eric Weinstein calls the pre-internet custodians of secrets the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) — the media organisations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation. In hindsight, the internet had already begun our liberation from the DISC prison upon the prison death of financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. Almost half of Americans polled that year mistrusted the official story that he died by suicide, suggesting that DISC had lost total control of the narrative.

When Thiel writes about a “war on the internet” and “the internet” that had “begun our liberation,” the natural assumption is to assume that he’s speaking figuratively, that this is a metonym or synecdoche meaning “people on the internet.” But let’s say he’s being literal: for Thiel, the internet is a subject, it is doing something and the machines, The Big Machine has agency—it is “agentic,” as the tech people like to say. This is the viewpoint of the “Dark Enlightenment” and “neo-reaction,” which forms part of Thiel’s intellectual milieu. The belief is that a technological singularity is coming and the elect must work to accelerate it. The state must organize itself like an enterprise for this work to be completed. Progress, which is hampered by democracy, must have an authoritarian state to continue unabated. This is, of course, reactionary modernism: a belief in technological advances without the sentimental baggage of the Enlightenment.

Technology itself is the subject of history: it’s somewhere out there in the future reaching back to us. It beckons us to the apocalypse. A.I., the internet, capitalism, and computers, are all just foreshadowing of this singularity. I’ve heard it reported that there are cults in Silicon Valley where they believe that with A.I. they are communing with spirits and demons. In the dialectic of Enlightenment: the extremes of superstition and instrumental rationality are identical. But what’s going on here is a mystified relationship to capital, the commodity fetish: it’s the machines, the commodities, the things that are moving, have souls and inner lives. It is exactly as Marx put it: “The products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations, both with each other and with the human race.” Thiel and the tech capitalists say, “We are merely its servants. We are not responsible.” They are serving a natural or even supernatural process, a force ultimately beyond their control. Ultimately, this can become the hallmark of a totalitarian mentality: a superhuman entity, nature, race, the Volk, historical progress, the species, is the true subject of history, which justifies anything in its service.

What does rule by the internet mean in the short term? Well, on Thiel’s telling, the proliferation of conspiracy theories and the feeding of paranoia. The promotion of paranoia and conspiracy as a technique of rule. He goes off on what appears to be a tangent about Dr. Fauci and the JFK assassination. He calls for the exposure of the conspiracies, of the ancien regime’s secrets. For what purpose? To feed the internet, to stoke the engines. It’s not to resolve the questions. No, he thinks it should be done “piecemeal.”

South Africa confronted its apartheid history with a formal commission, but answering the questions above with piecemeal declassifications would befit both Trump’s chaotic style and our internet world, which processes and propagates short packets of information. The first Trump administration shied away from declassifications because it still believed in the rightwing deep state of an Oliver Stone movie. This belief has faded.

So Trump declassifies things, tantalizing the public in a “piecemeal” way. It never adds up to a coherent picture. It’s not information, it gives the appearance of information, it’s a method of social control, a perpetual process of partial limited hang-out. What justifies this suspicious reading? Well, two paragraphs earlier:

Our First Amendment frames the rules of engagement for domestic fights over free speech, but the global reach of the internet tempts its adversaries into a global war. Can we believe that a Brazilian judge banned X without American backing, in a tragicomic perversion of the Monroe Doctrine? Were we complicit in Australia’s recent legislation requiring age verification for social media users, the beginning of the end of internet anonymity? Did we muster up even two minutes’ criticism of the UK, which has arrested hundreds of people a year for online speech triggering, among other things, “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”? We may expect no better from Orwellian dictatorships in East Asia and Eurasia, but we must support a free internet in Oceania.

Here we see Thiel at his most sinister and his most silly—they are inextricable modes. Two minutes criticism — the obvious reference is “two minutes hate,” the ritual of public control in George Orwell’s 1984. This reference is immediately confirmed by his talk about “Orwellian dictatorships” and his reference to our part of the world as Oceania. But if he brings us into an Orwellian world, shouldn’t we assume an Orwellian meaning to “free internet.” So we must assume he means the opposite then—”freedom is slavery”—“freedom of speech” means direct manipulation and derailment of public discourse through these “revelations.”

A note on South Africa: No doubt, Thiel is aware that his white South African origin, along with that of Sacks and Musk, is being made much of now. When he talks about the Truth and Reconciliation Committee Thiel is doing a kind of ironic reversal. Of course, from the point of view of the unreconstructed white South African, how good of a thing was it? Might we venture that there may be a racial subtext here: “Power has rightfully returned to the whites.” In any case “the truth and reconciliation committee, is just an implement of the new regime, a mode of political control. They think that liberal democracy is implicitly totalitarian, which justifies an explicitly totalitarian reply. Show trial. That’s sort of what’s being proposed here: the partial revelation of tantalizing conspiracies and plots.

I think on reading this piece, one might fairly ask—and any journalist could— Does Thiel believe, along with Girard, that the scapegoat mechanism no longer works, or just that we need new myths and scapegoats? Is he realy a Christian or a pagan worshipping at the altar of technological Moloch? When the Silicon Valley occultists commune with the spirits are they talking to God or the Devil? It seems like as the alternative to violence spinning out of control, he wants to focus it on a few enemies, he wants the new regime to produce scapegoats. I think he doesn’t want it to look too savage and primitive. It has to have some semblance of order, otherwise, it will be too clear what’s going on—like the text, it needs to be a little esoteric. It has to have the appurtenances of justice and truth and be given a Christian covering, the possibility of forgiveness and mercy.

If you are creeped out by now that’s the point: this is all meant to be a little scary. He likes the whiff of incense and the air of hocus pocus. The founder of Palantir wants to imagine himself as a sorcerer. It is meant to sound impressive and, yes, stupefying. But he is not just mystifying but also himself mystified: fetishizing the world of commodities and their production as a religion. Being in the position to forgive is being in a position of power. And perhaps the ultimate one. Another question we might put to all these characters: Who do you think you are? God?