Wikidworld (#29)
Journalists sometimes bracket the Peter Thiel types as would-be “philosopher kings.” I’d suggest a more accurate rendering of their aspirational identity is would-be “philosopher engineers.”
This week was an especially good week because I had, not one, but two epiphanies. I’m aware there’s a level of glibness to some of the stuff I write that likely causes some head-scratching for people reading it. But writing even glib things is a surprisingly arduous and fraught journey. I do want to produce good glib, not just mediocre or stupid glib. And so I depend upon the occasional epiphany to establish that there is ground beneath my feet. That grounding gives me confidence that what I’m writing makes sense.
The first of my epiphanies this week concerned the idea that we can explain much about the worldview of the new wave of “illiberal” intellectuals — such as Adrian Vermeule and Steve Bannon — by appreciating how dependent they are on systematic philosophies deduced from “self-evident” premises that are not open to question.
These self-evident premises — so critical for Catholic natural law moral philosophy — obviate any need for actual “real-world” evidence to validate the practical outcomes to which these philosophies lead. Any political program connected to these philosophies therefore requires an enforcement regime to manage those who do not accept these premises. Hence the connection between abstract ideas and very un-abstract authoritarian institutions this enforcement regime may propagate.
The second epiphany, which I began to discuss yesterday, concerns the centrality of an engineered instrumentation of the built world to explaining how libertarian devotees of Ayn Rand or Frederick von Hayek — such as Peter Thiel and Blake Masters — might migrate with such apparent ease to an authoritarian position seemingly at odds with libertarianism.
The focus on the engineering of the world — which lies at the heart of anthropogenic disruption of the world — is central to my larger Wikidworld project and an idea that I have been thinking about for a long time. However, I was gratified to realize the usefulness of this idea for explaining the otherwise paradoxical relationship within illiberalism between libertarianism and authoritarianism.
Here’s how I think about this connection between illiberalism and engineering. Journalists sometimes bracket the Peter Thiel types as would-be “philosopher kings.” I’d suggest a more accurate rendering of their aspirational identity is would-be “philosopher engineers.” The paradigmatic professional identity of these Ayn Rand admirers is not finance, but engineering (Thiel, Kalanick, Mercer – information technology; Tillerson – civil engineering, Pompeo – mechanical engineering; Koch – nuclear and chemical engineering).
Obviously, the engineering background is not prerequisite for the Ayn Rand infatuation (“conscious capitalist” John Mackey of Whole Foods, a Rand disciple, has a background in religion and philosophy). While Peter Thiel is not himself a coder, he of course does combine quite brilliantly the mindsets of the technology visionary and finance impresario. He also has a background in religion and philosophy.
This correlation helps us to appreciate the salience of engineering’s zero-sum perspectives on economic life and economic competition. Consider the engineered instrumentation required to compel the earth to yield its fruits for a built human world. This anthropogenic instrumentation of the world is an extractive model — a material carving out, expropriation, and depletion of resources that generally occurs in geologic time, while we consume and transform these resources in human time.
This tension between two logarithmically different time scales requires enormous leverage – human technique and instrumentation that extends our reach, if not logarithmically than at least geometrically. Of course that is the purpose of engineered technology, which unconstrained foists upon humans a self-reinforcing illusion of omnipotence (while not truly dissipating the tension between geologic and human time).
Software engineering and financial engineering, while not concerned so explicitly with material hollowing out and rebuilding of the earth, applies a similarly Archimedean understanding of leverage. Consider the reliance of speculative, trading entities on debt capital and their efforts, via high-speed trading, to instrument time across a logarithmic scale that transforms the finite we associate with human time (hours, days, months years) into the infinitesimality we associate with scientific time (the approximation of the infinitely small or vast).
Quantum computing will only turbocharge this time-scaled financial leverage. Of course, the profligate electricity requirements of digital currency “mining” also discloses the convergence of financial and engineering mindsets around concepts and units of time.
Yaron Brook has long served as the caretaker of Ayn Rand’s libertarian philosophy (as has another fellow named Peter Schwartz who is not the same person as me). Brook wants us to believe that capitalist vision of Ayn Rand is all about creating win-win outcomes. As we know all too well, however, the Donald Trump philosophy of deal-making has always been all about separating the world into winners and losers. It is a zero-sum game. And often, if we’re to be honest, a negative sum, heads-I-win-tails-you-lose game.
But of course it is not just Trump. Private equity firms take companies off public markets and strip them bare. Extractive industries by definition employ brutal means to subdue and conquer nature. The worldview of privately owned wealth — with its implicit awareness of finity, of scarcity, of mortality — is deeply physical and very much about control and domination. That is its logic. If there is a contractual basis to private wealth transactions, more often the focus of contrast is on establishing the legal framework for building moats and externalizing risk. There is no win-win. No equality. There is only live-die. The ultimate inequality.
Which also may explain the perverse obsession of these billionaires to lever themselves. With escape hatches from global meltdown (luxury fallout shelters and security bunkers, New Zealand citizenship, Mars colonization). With the engineered extension of our life span to Old Testament or Middle Earth elvish dimensions. Ayn Rand’s fictive worlds – with their commitment to individual survival as the ultimate (and truly only) human value – fully comport to this worldview.
Once we establish these parameters – specifically, the swashbuckling heuristics dividing the world between zeroes and heroes, takers and makers, gods and mortals (masters of the universe) – much about the Trump Administration becomes clear:
Walls – Command and control of human bodies (migration, policing, incarceration, torture, reproductive health) and material goods (trade barriers).
Suspicion – Assumptions about rampant fraud, abuse, deviance, and deceit in government, elections, and from impoverished classes, marginalized social classes and nations.
Secrecy – Control of information alongside antagonism to behavioral and data transparency.
Surveillance – Viewing and monitoring without being viewed and monitored (consider Peter Thiel’s security company, Palantir, one of his many horrific dystopian appropriations from Lord of the Rings).
Transactions – Obsession with zero-sum, transactional, contingent, negotiated bilateral bargains and agreements between state and non-state entities.
Relationships – Limited concept of an abstract “public welfare” and a more emotionally resonant commitment to personal relationships and “family” (blurring the political distinction between rule of law and organized crime).
Aggression – Aggressive, conflict-seeking interpersonal styles with disdain for virtues associated with humility and acceptance of uncertainty. Let’s call it “the rise of the asshole” (we are rife with White House exemplars).
Progress – Boom and bust “trading” mentality and discomfort with linear ideas of progress based on legal and institutional norms and incentives.
Business – Psychological alignment of private capital with small business, and the shared contempt of these two privately owned economic sectors for elites, academics, intellectuals, and public officials.
Physicality – Focus on the built world, with a suspicion of ideas, abstractions, science, and data.
Subsidiarity – Roman Catholic concept of parcelized sovereignty that superficially conforms to well-known ideas about constitutional federalism, but which can also hew toward a medievalized, feudal understanding of the private distribution of power and wealth.
Together these assumptions, qualities, and dispositions coalesce into a series of overlapping cognitive maps that are refractory. Which is to say these maps sharply angle the private wealth community away from what we might loosely call science-based Enlightenment liberalism and toward a more profoundly medieval bunker mentality that is threat-based, tribal, feudal, mythic, and profoundly zero-sum.
What I am reading today
Free Speech on Trial (BIG) — A terrific take on two antitrust cases involving publishing — books and video. Stoller argues eloquently about the negative impacts of consolidation on free speech.
Emulating schizophrenia in a dish (Columbia Zuckerman Institute) — A fascinating scientific breakthrough that holds promise for uncovering treatments for psychiatric disorders.
Billions pour into bioplastics as markets begin ramping up (Associated Press) — In line with the truism that necessisity is the mother of invention, companies are investing large sums of money in biodegradable plastic-substitutes to replace petrochemical-based plastics that are busily devouring the world.
Demographic dilemma: slowing population growth, not pandemic, at the root of U.S. worker shortage (University of California) — Powerful data that some may use to push forward the Great Replacement Theory, but which really tells us how badly we need immigration to meet the demand for labor. Of course, there is also the argument that we don’t need more people at all.
Spiders Seem to Have REM-like Sleep and May Even Dream (Scientific American) — Welcome to the world of arachnid dreaming!
If you like what I’m doing, please recommend Wikidworld to people you know. I don’t do any social media, so am dependent on the kindnesses of friends (and strangers) to gain more subscribers. Thanks!
Wikidworld. Reimagining Western Civilization.
Season 1: Dark Enlightenment
Episode 5: Peter Thiel’s Techbro Totalitarianism
Part 4: The Rise of the Philosopher King
Issue#: S1-E6-P4
Date: August 11, 2022