Wikidworld (#31)
But this was all a sideshow. Because Peter Thiel, philosopher engineer, already had moved on to more subtle, cunning, intricate and – quite literally – darker musings about a world on the brink.
Welcome to the 7th weekly episode of our Dark Enlightenment season, entitled, well, Dark Enlightenment. I never quite got to the “Techbro Totalitarianism” and “Mid-Term Elections” parts last week, so that will be top of mind this week.
To cover this terrain, we’ll wend our way from Peter Thiel, neo-reactionary philosopher; to Peter Thiel, bagman for uber-Trumpy Senate candidates; to the misbegotten Senate candidates themselves, J.D. Vance and Blake Masters; and finally; to actual Dark Enlightenment software programmer and blogger Curtis Yarvin.
Yarvin deserves special mention. An influential voice within the rising techno-totalitarianism substrate of American politics, Yarvin hangs with people like Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel. He’s been described as the “alt-right’s favorite philosophy instructor,” the person most closely identified with the contemporary “Dark Enlightenment” philosophy movement that we’ve been riffing on.
I also want to give you some sense of where things are heading through the end of 2022. Season 1 ends on September 9. After a 3-week hiatus, Season 2 will start on Monday, October 3 and run into early December. I don’t have a title yet for the second season, but it will consider the last 60 years of American history, with a focus on the remarkable emergence, success, and influence of the right-wing policy and legal infrastructure that we have recently come to know and love so well.
The thesis for this week is that the Peter Thiel and his fellow Dark Enlightenment techbro miscreants are a mutant generation of political philosophers and activists. In their own minds, certainly, they are not merely presumptive heirs to the chaos of the Trump years, but light years ahead of Trump and everyone else in terms of their quantum, 4D-chess grasp of reality.
If we’re to be entirely fair to their understanding of themselves in relation to Trump and to the rest of us, consider HAL the rogue computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. And then consider the prehistoric hominins at the beginning of the movie, who are enlightened and brought past innocence by the alien monolith that introduces them to weapons, hunting, war, and culture.
If this all applies, then for Peter Thiel and his Bitcoin buddies, the 2022 midterm elections are their coming-out party, their debutante ball. The midterms will be the moment when HAL is turned on and takes charge.
For many of those of the libertarian persuasion in thrall to Peter Thiel, their first moment of utter dishabillement occurred when he confessed, in an essay published to the Cato Unbound website entitled, The Education of a Libertarian, that he no longer believed in the compatibility of freedom and democracy. And if one were forced to choose? Well now….
This was of course exciting, thrilling, thralling stuff. Freedom and democracy not compatible? How could this be? Please, Peter Thiel, darkenlighten us! And so Peter Thiel did.
The dark ages first descended upon us, he intoned, in the 1920s and 1930s. From this time forward, “the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
As one might expect, some hue and cry ensued about the impugned reputations of welfare beneficiaries and voting women (which likely further enthralled the Thiel bros). But this was all a sideshow. Because Peter Thiel, philosopher engineer, already had moved on to more subtle, cunning, intricate and – quite literally – darker musings about a world on the brink.
The remainder of this newsletter will concern Thiel’s hard-to-find (although I had no trouble finding it), dense, oft-cited, but rarely adequately pondered essay, The Straussian Moment.
By way of introduction to the centrality of this essay for understanding Peter Thiel, I want to recommend everyone glance at this fascinating (3,400-word!) Amazon review of Max Chafkin’s recent biography, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power.
The author of this Amazon review only goes by the name “Kristin.” This Kristin has published no other Amazon reviews and provides no information about themself on the reviewer page. Kristin’s review is entitled When the Son of Man Comes, Will He Find Faith on Earth? — from Luke 18.8 — and a huge portion of the review is devoted to an exegesis of Peter Thiel’s Christianity, which Kristin believes is central to understanding “Peter” (Kristin always refers to him as “Peter,” 66 times, in fact). Kristin mostly approves of Max Chafkin’s biography, but only gives the book 3 stars out of 5 because Chafkin himself pays scant heed to Peter Thiel’s Christian faith.
I assume a high probability exists that “Kristin” is, in fact, Peter Thiel. I’ve looked for any conversation on this point and have found none – the author of the recent New Yorker article about the Chafkin biography refers to this Amazon review without comment on its provenance. But the review is remarkably specific and detailed and, if Thiel really did write it, offers a very rich and unique “meta” perspective on Peter Thiel himself.
Whoever Kristin is, they were correct to center our understanding of Peter Thiel around his Christianity, which is unorthodox but also quite literal in its interpretation of scripture. The Dummies version of The Straussian Moment would be something like this: 1) globalization is the Antichrist; 2) the Antichrist is antecedent to the Apocalypse foretold in the Book of Revelations; and 3) only a turn toward Christ can save humanity from annihilation.
This perspective on Peter Thiel’s faith and this synopsis of The Straussian Moment are salient for any effort to make sense of the political project Thiel has funded with the firehose of money he’s directed at former proteges and current Republican Senate candidates J.D. Vance and Blake Masters.
The Straussian Moment itself was a paper written for a conference that Thiel organized to honor his mentor, philosopher Rene Girard, at Stanford in 2004 — a kind of metaphysical effort to assign meaning to 9/11 and its aftermath as an ultimate crisis of globalization. Not coincidentally, it was in these years of shadow cast by the attack on the homeland and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that Thiel’s hedge fund invested in the technology that would power his surveillance-focused data mining and data analytics company, Palantir.
The Straussian Moment begins with an invocation of 9/11 and introduces as its premise this breathtaking theme:
The twenty-first century started with a bang on September 11, 2001. In those shocking hours, the entire political and military framework of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and indeed of the modern age, with its emphasis on deterrent armies, rational nation-states, public debates, and international diplomacy, was called into question. For how could mere talking or even great force deter a handful of crazy, determined, and suicidal persons who seemingly operated outside of all the norms of the liberal West? And what needed now to be done, given that technology had advanced to a point where a tiny number of people could inflict unprecedented levels of damage and death?
Could one possibly disagree with any of this? One could.
There is a predetermined quality to much that Peter Thiel writes that doesn’t comport with the facts – even the facts as he presents them. I’ll give three examples, from this paragraph alone.
First, the 9/11 attackers were certainly “determined,” but what made them especially dangerous was actually that they were not “crazy” and not “suicidal.” From the perspective of these attackers, they were doing a job. They believed they were in a war. They were soldiers. And soldiers may face certain death, with equipoise even, and not be crazy or suicidal.
Second, in reality, of course, the technology used by the terrorists was not “advanced.” They flew commercial aircraft of a conventional sort and of a certain vintage that Peter Thiel himself has cited as an instance of how, “over the past thirty years, there have been no radical advances in transportation technology (in-flight DVD units are nice, but not revolutionary).” Again, what made the attackers dangerous was their successful fulfillment of their mission using quite commonplace and ordinary technology.
Third, the 9/11 attacks did not prove that somehow, for the first time in history, “a tiny number of people could inflict unprecedented levels of damage and death.” It is true that airplanes are not generally used as ballistic weapons themselves. But for decades, they certainly have delivered payloads that have caused “levels of damage and death” equivalent to and often far greater than the death toll of the 9/11 attacks.
These “slippages” in the Thiel corpus are prevalent and numerous enough to be a problem. We’ll explore tomorrow how this sort of slippery logic and exposition finds its way into the techno-nationalist political movement Peter Thiel is underwriting.
What I am reading today.
When the Son of Man Comes, Will He Find Faith on Earth? (Amazon Book Review) — Extremely knowledgeable, close-to-the-subject review of the new Peter Thiel biography.
White Nationalist Who Met With Peter Thiel Admired Terroristic Literature (Southern Poverty Law Center) — A remarkable piece of forensic journalism.
Anti-abortion groups take aim at medicated, at-home abortions (Washington Post) — The next major front in the war on women’s bodies. I have wondered why liberals/progressives let cultural reactionaries claim the “pro-life” label. Many ways exist to revere and protect life. Theirs is the worst.
Honest Elections Project backs the independent state legislature theory (NPR) — A spinoff of the Federalist Society that has made strategic use of a ridiculous and formerly disregarded theory of elections governance that would essentially destroy the entire presidential election process.
Breadbasket Diplomacy: Preserving Wheat as a Tool of American Statecraft (War on the Rocks) — A really thoughtful piece on the role of food in diplomacy.
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 7: Dark Enlightenment
Part 1: The Straussian Moment
Issue#: S1-E7-P1
Date: August 15, 2022