Terrific post. Thiel is the most repellant to me of the Tech Lords, which is why I kind of hate that I find him the most interesting.
What I find most interesting is that he is willing to write in such an openly metaphysical vein. The result is that engineer and business types are likely to be flummoxed by discourse that seems to depart from positivism and a familiar atheistic rationalism––the only modes of reasoning they know how to credit. So they have to either dismiss him as a weirdo or else exalt him as a genius they can't understand.
At the same time, his metaphysical bent can be said to give away the metaphysics that the engineers and tech atheists believe in without knowing it. They really do understand modernist reality in implicit theological terms. Technology is magic/sacred. Whiteness is a "chosen" ontology. Critical theorists on the left are starting to get a handle on this in interesting ways, e.g. Wendy Brown's analysis of how capitalism even at its most secular is religious, or the anthropologist Viveiros de Castro on how technology in modernity is a category of magic.
It's a great insight that, whether Thiel is trying to play the part of the magus or else really sees himself as one, he is exposing what his political desires really are, i.e. have the power of a god that he may or may not believe he is (my bet is he believes he is at least a demi-god).
If Peter continues to be a good boy like this, his partner will remain irrelevant in the right's eyes. But if his God complex grows unwieldly and he forgets his place...
"We are merely its servants. We are not responsible.” They are serving a natural or even supernatural process, a force ultimately beyond their control."
The irony is that the sili-tech-bro gambit in their gestating state alliance with trump is to evade government control of their anti-social, elitist ambitions. Pretty old school robber baron aspirations for these putative new-agers. The contradiction between their dilettante gear-head adolescent sci-fi theology and their pathological resistance to any sort of social control over their ambitions whatsoever is notable.
Great post—thanks! (I think) for pointing me to Thiel's screed.
To your last point: Thiel probably doesn't thinks he is God (that would be blasphemous). He thinks he is a priest. Many paleo-Catholics want the Latin mass back not because the vernacular mass uses poor translations. And and not because they actually understand Latin (or Greek) — tho some do. No. It gives them smells, bells, and incantations. The meaning of the words doesn't matter. Just their recitation. What matters even more is the authority of the priest to tell the hoi polloi what the words demand of them. Which is mostly obedience. To the priest. (Oddly, no one ever seems to notice that presuming to speak for God—which is what interpretation does—is itself a blasphemous violation of the 2nd commandment (in the RC numbering)).
To your earlier point about Thiel's invocation of "truth and reconciliation": When 'believers' talk about 'forgiveness' following 'repentence' this generally means that the 'sinner' will be forgiven only if the sinner first repents. Who is the sinner? Not Thiel. Not Vance. Not Trump. Not the J6-ers. Not the MAGA faithful. The sinners are those who did not vote for Trump, those who don't believe in MAGA, those who oppose MAGA, those who take seriously the notion of freedom and the responsibility that comes along with 'the knowledge of good and evil'.
Nice! A girardian mage is a priest, that is, someone who is authorized to offer sacrifice (scapegoat) on a community's behalf. And I'm sure Girard was a Catholic, so what you wrote fits very nicely into John's argument.
Can't a lot of this (all of it?) just be boiled down to: "I am rich and powerful, I want to do what I want to do, I am going to do it anyway, and I am also a nerd so I want a 'higher cause' justification for all that?"
In that way the invocation of Epstein reads kind of like a Pervert Reichstag Fire to me, a post-hoc justification for a power grab that was going to come anyway.
i think that if a 75-year-old hippie, who read the thiel op-ed last week and came to the conclusion that he's like a sophomore in my dorm who had a consciousness that was, like, some Lit-Crit anthology put out by *the national enquirer" staff, and who shit money, he'd say this was a great commentary. Personally, you had me at "hermeneutics of suspicion." i love you.
Thoughtful and highly entertaining. Please keep it up as the grandiosity and narcissism of Trump and his billionaire pals is about to reach full flower.
I agree with Robert Evans in his Thiel series for Behind the Bastards. To paraphrase, Thiel is extremely, weirdly afraid of dying. (Odd for a Catholic.) In part, this is because he's extremely, weirdly afraid of not being special. He's also very afraid that someone or someones will turn their anti-elite anger against him in a violent fashion. Everything else about him is varying levels of interesting and important. But that probably explains most of his bullshit.
"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."
This has always struck me as, well, bullshit. I'm all for close reading, but the idea that there are "hidden meanings" squirreled away in a text just waiting for an enterprising reader to decode strikes me as mostly just a way for a reader to give up on reading. It takes several steps beyond interpretation, and I think it's not a coincidence that a faction of Straussians have (more or less) followed this path toward outright fascism.
I could only glean Thiel’s article was vaguely menacing insanity before his use of the phrase ‘ancien regime’ angered me enough to stop giving it much thought.
And wasn’t Epstein besties with Trump and ended up dying under suspicion circumstances in federal prison under Barr and Trump? That regime ain’t so ancien
Meanwhile, some inside the next administration are promising “rough Roman justice” for their enemies. When one faction is promising some distorted version of Christ and the other is promising to be the thing that crushed Christ, you can be sure the rest of us are fucked unless they manage to devour each other before they get to us. I have my doubts.
His dark musings about Fauci are the usual tissue of innuendo garnered from WSJ op-eds, operating under the idiotic assumption that the head of the NIAID, which funds hundreds if not thousands of grants and has multiple levels of grant oversight, was personally laser-focused for years on one grant for bat virus research in China.
When I saw the piece and its byline in the FT, I thought, "Oh shit, our state's leading fascist is sounding off" and read a bit and noted that it sounded kind of rational on the surface, and turned the page because the FT has a lot of content that's worth reading, and at my age I don't have time for reading fascist bullshit.
To me, most telling aspect about Thiel is his conversion to Catholicism. I mean, if you’re going to pick one, why not pick the most guilded, ornate and tortured of the bunch.
But he’s not an actual believer. He likes the frame work, the top down organizational means of classifying and determining human “worth”.
Can we get a “Conclave” remake, but with oligarchs?
Interesting how Epstein remains important in the right-wing pantheon despite their rulers, starting with Il Duce himself, being known associates of the guy. Then there is Matt Gaetz frolicking around? Feels like a loyalty test, an actually Orwellian dictum — you are to remain outraged at transgressions, which your overlords also indulge in, but you are to love them.
Terrific post. Thiel is the most repellant to me of the Tech Lords, which is why I kind of hate that I find him the most interesting.
What I find most interesting is that he is willing to write in such an openly metaphysical vein. The result is that engineer and business types are likely to be flummoxed by discourse that seems to depart from positivism and a familiar atheistic rationalism––the only modes of reasoning they know how to credit. So they have to either dismiss him as a weirdo or else exalt him as a genius they can't understand.
At the same time, his metaphysical bent can be said to give away the metaphysics that the engineers and tech atheists believe in without knowing it. They really do understand modernist reality in implicit theological terms. Technology is magic/sacred. Whiteness is a "chosen" ontology. Critical theorists on the left are starting to get a handle on this in interesting ways, e.g. Wendy Brown's analysis of how capitalism even at its most secular is religious, or the anthropologist Viveiros de Castro on how technology in modernity is a category of magic.
It's a great insight that, whether Thiel is trying to play the part of the magus or else really sees himself as one, he is exposing what his political desires really are, i.e. have the power of a god that he may or may not believe he is (my bet is he believes he is at least a demi-god).
My own short version of Thiel's screed: "The Internet is destroying consensus social reality, and that's a good thing. Heil Trump!"
If Peter continues to be a good boy like this, his partner will remain irrelevant in the right's eyes. But if his God complex grows unwieldly and he forgets his place...
"We are merely its servants. We are not responsible.” They are serving a natural or even supernatural process, a force ultimately beyond their control."
The irony is that the sili-tech-bro gambit in their gestating state alliance with trump is to evade government control of their anti-social, elitist ambitions. Pretty old school robber baron aspirations for these putative new-agers. The contradiction between their dilettante gear-head adolescent sci-fi theology and their pathological resistance to any sort of social control over their ambitions whatsoever is notable.
Great post—thanks! (I think) for pointing me to Thiel's screed.
To your last point: Thiel probably doesn't thinks he is God (that would be blasphemous). He thinks he is a priest. Many paleo-Catholics want the Latin mass back not because the vernacular mass uses poor translations. And and not because they actually understand Latin (or Greek) — tho some do. No. It gives them smells, bells, and incantations. The meaning of the words doesn't matter. Just their recitation. What matters even more is the authority of the priest to tell the hoi polloi what the words demand of them. Which is mostly obedience. To the priest. (Oddly, no one ever seems to notice that presuming to speak for God—which is what interpretation does—is itself a blasphemous violation of the 2nd commandment (in the RC numbering)).
To your earlier point about Thiel's invocation of "truth and reconciliation": When 'believers' talk about 'forgiveness' following 'repentence' this generally means that the 'sinner' will be forgiven only if the sinner first repents. Who is the sinner? Not Thiel. Not Vance. Not Trump. Not the J6-ers. Not the MAGA faithful. The sinners are those who did not vote for Trump, those who don't believe in MAGA, those who oppose MAGA, those who take seriously the notion of freedom and the responsibility that comes along with 'the knowledge of good and evil'.
Nice! A girardian mage is a priest, that is, someone who is authorized to offer sacrifice (scapegoat) on a community's behalf. And I'm sure Girard was a Catholic, so what you wrote fits very nicely into John's argument.
Can't a lot of this (all of it?) just be boiled down to: "I am rich and powerful, I want to do what I want to do, I am going to do it anyway, and I am also a nerd so I want a 'higher cause' justification for all that?"
In that way the invocation of Epstein reads kind of like a Pervert Reichstag Fire to me, a post-hoc justification for a power grab that was going to come anyway.
i think that if a 75-year-old hippie, who read the thiel op-ed last week and came to the conclusion that he's like a sophomore in my dorm who had a consciousness that was, like, some Lit-Crit anthology put out by *the national enquirer" staff, and who shit money, he'd say this was a great commentary. Personally, you had me at "hermeneutics of suspicion." i love you.
Thoughtful and highly entertaining. Please keep it up as the grandiosity and narcissism of Trump and his billionaire pals is about to reach full flower.
I agree with Robert Evans in his Thiel series for Behind the Bastards. To paraphrase, Thiel is extremely, weirdly afraid of dying. (Odd for a Catholic.) In part, this is because he's extremely, weirdly afraid of not being special. He's also very afraid that someone or someones will turn their anti-elite anger against him in a violent fashion. Everything else about him is varying levels of interesting and important. But that probably explains most of his bullshit.
Need to know more about Silicon Valley cults
Tangential but:
"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."
This has always struck me as, well, bullshit. I'm all for close reading, but the idea that there are "hidden meanings" squirreled away in a text just waiting for an enterprising reader to decode strikes me as mostly just a way for a reader to give up on reading. It takes several steps beyond interpretation, and I think it's not a coincidence that a faction of Straussians have (more or less) followed this path toward outright fascism.
From here on I'm going to blame Leo Strauss for braindead pop culture fan theories
Thank you for parsing this mess.
I could only glean Thiel’s article was vaguely menacing insanity before his use of the phrase ‘ancien regime’ angered me enough to stop giving it much thought.
And wasn’t Epstein besties with Trump and ended up dying under suspicion circumstances in federal prison under Barr and Trump? That regime ain’t so ancien
Meanwhile, some inside the next administration are promising “rough Roman justice” for their enemies. When one faction is promising some distorted version of Christ and the other is promising to be the thing that crushed Christ, you can be sure the rest of us are fucked unless they manage to devour each other before they get to us. I have my doubts.
His dark musings about Fauci are the usual tissue of innuendo garnered from WSJ op-eds, operating under the idiotic assumption that the head of the NIAID, which funds hundreds if not thousands of grants and has multiple levels of grant oversight, was personally laser-focused for years on one grant for bat virus research in China.
I know he is important because Money, but it really bums me out to see this horseshit in the FT.
When I saw the piece and its byline in the FT, I thought, "Oh shit, our state's leading fascist is sounding off" and read a bit and noted that it sounded kind of rational on the surface, and turned the page because the FT has a lot of content that's worth reading, and at my age I don't have time for reading fascist bullshit.
So were most of the FT readers! 9/10 of the 500+ comments were variations on 'wtf is this doing here?'
To me, most telling aspect about Thiel is his conversion to Catholicism. I mean, if you’re going to pick one, why not pick the most guilded, ornate and tortured of the bunch.
But he’s not an actual believer. He likes the frame work, the top down organizational means of classifying and determining human “worth”.
Can we get a “Conclave” remake, but with oligarchs?
Interesting how Epstein remains important in the right-wing pantheon despite their rulers, starting with Il Duce himself, being known associates of the guy. Then there is Matt Gaetz frolicking around? Feels like a loyalty test, an actually Orwellian dictum — you are to remain outraged at transgressions, which your overlords also indulge in, but you are to love them.