It’s time for conservatives to scrutinize the ideas of the intelligent, eccentric billionaire. They may not like what they find.
It’s time for conservatives to scrutinize the ideas of the intelligent, eccentric billionaire. They may not like what they find.
T en million dollars is a lot of money. It may not be to billionaire PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. But Thiel didn’t get rich by throwing his money away. So when he gives $10 million to a super PAC supporting a now official Senate run in Arizona by Blake Masters, his former student, collaborator on the 2014 book Zero to One, and current associate, his thinking is obvious.
This isn’t always true. Not because Thiel can’t think. His public statements suggest he has read Thomas Aquinas, Locke, Goethe, Nietzsche, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, René Girard, and others. That Thiel speaks intelligently publicly affirms his idiosyncrasy. So do his apparent right-leaning inclinations, unusual for Silicon Valley.
Yet examining Thiel’s beliefs can be confusing. His fondness for thinkers, such as Strauss, who emphasize that an elite few can divine otherwise hidden truths confuses things further. Another complication: Thiel values his privacy. In 2016, he was revealed as the secret funder of Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker, a website that, against his wishes, had previously outed Thiel as gay. There is no such malice here; his actions were defensible. But as Thiel tries to increase his influence on the right, it’s worth examining his beliefs. Conservatives might not like what they find.
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Peter Thiel is concerned about the slowing of innovation. “When tracked against the admittedly lofty hopes of the 1950s and 1960s,” he wrote in 2011, “technological progress has fallen short in many domains.” In 2014, he complained that “the smartphones that distract us from our surroundings also distract us from the fact that our surroundings are strangely old; only computers and communications have improved dramatically since midcentury.” In a 2016 speech at the Republican National Convention, Thiel yoked his nostalgia for this supposedly lost vision of an advancing future to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. “When Donald Trump asks us to Make America Great Again, he’s not suggesting a return to the past,” Thiel said. “He’s running to lead us back to that bright future” the past envisioned. Last year, Thiel called returning to this vision “the most urgent public debate of the 2020s.”
Thiel is nostalgic not only for that era’s advances but also for the “consensus” that supported them. He invokes contemporary thinkers and science-fiction writers to prove we have strayed. On certain facts, Thiel seems right. But he also seems impatient with the failure of his desired future to arrive. Thus he downplays advances he deems insufficient. (For example: However much medicine has advanced, Thiel remains bothered by . . . death.)
But this consensus was not quite what Thiel imagines. Look at science fiction. Sure, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, and others were diligently prophesying. But they and others produced many visions. One could find much darker prophecies than what Thiel imagines all authors then believed. For example, he thinks that our view of artificial intelligence “was once bright and hopeful” but has now “gone very dark.” But science fiction has long explored all of A.I.’s implications: e.g., Harlan Ellison’s 1967 short story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” in which a supercomputer wipes out humanity save a handful of people it tortures. Or coldly malevolent HAL 9000, a Clarke creation, in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Moreover, for all their foresight, these authors missed some things. The early 21st century of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 adaptation, on which Clarke worked, has lunar bases and iPads, but also long-defunct Pan Am, Bell Telephone, and the USSR. This may seem like nit- or cherry-picking, but it’s worth remembering that works of the past are not always reliable predictors of the future — nor should we always expect them to be, much less hold them up as templates thereof.
Many of these works do, however, share a fundamentally technocratic outlook, befitting a society with immense faith in experts in charge of monolithic institutions to solve problems scientifically. This ethos coexisted with forced conformity, the product of a series of socially compressive experiences: the Great Depression, World War II, Jim Crow. Thiel invokes the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program; elites then also bungled the Vietnam War, and they became so afraid of overpopulation that they encouraged population control and sterilization.
The era’s successes contributed to these and other failures. Thiel writes in Zero to One that our government, which once invented nukes and explored the moon, “after 40 years of indefinite creep . . . mainly just provides insurance.” Perhaps such achievements spilled over into social policy, making human nature something to be managed scientifically. But Thiel ignores the limitations of obsessing over this one vision of the future.
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“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,” is one encapsulation of Thielism. “We wanted” assumes that mankind’s collective desires are knowable, and that Thiel knows them. “Flying cars” is the shorthand for his desired future. “Instead” implies we’ve ceased to progress meaningfully. And “140 characters” further deprecates the rate of that progress, with Silicon Valley blamed.
But Thiel is a creature of the Valley: a Stanford alumnus who helped create PayPal and Facebook. Despite his contrarianism, he is comfortable elevating certain Valley mores and denizens to world-historical importance. It’s all over Zero to One. How Thiel seems pleased by the success of the movie The Social Network (2010). How cultish devotion to company success is celebrated, and blurring one’s personal life and one’s business life, and programmers’ garb. His harshest criticism of Silicon Valley monopolies then was that they “deserve their bad reputation — but only in a world where nothing changes.” Provided things change to Thiel’s satisfaction, he’s fine with monopolies. If they are innovating and not just copying, “creative monopolies aren’t just good for the rest of society; they’re powerful engines for making it better.” He even used to take seriously Google’s motto, “Don’t Be Evil,” as “characteristic of a kind of business that’s successful enough to take ethics seriously without jeopardizing its own existence. . . . Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money; non-monopolists can’t.” (He has since changed his mind on Google.) Thiel mostly criticizes failed businesses in Zero to One. Success means virtue in his worldview, in which Silicon Valley dominates.
True, Thiel has since left the Valley and begun criticizing it more seriously. He now complains that it “has much more the feel of a one-party state” politically, which he believes worsens its stagnation; that its companies have “not innovated enough”; and that it may have some complicity in the malevolence of the Chinese regime. But this is criticism of Silicon Valley on its own terms, making the problem the misuse, not the extent, of its dominance of national life. “As Silicon Valley has devolved into a place that produces apps like one that sends the word ‘Yo,’ Mr. Thiel worries its thinking is ‘not big enough to take our civilization to the next level,’” the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd wrote in a profile of him after the 2016 election. Thiel would have a properly reformed Valley continue altering civilization in its image. His complaints differ from those conservatives would make of its tendency to neglect the human element, to reduce people to mere tools, and to let our tools control us (or empower their creators to).
Dismissive of tech-skeptics, Thiel in Zero to One asserts that businesses that merge man and machine are the future: “As computers become more and more powerful, they won’t be substitutes for humans: they’ll be complements.” Thiel once even hoped that the Internet would “impact and force change on the existing social and political order.” He allows for some downsides. He invested in a firm that hopes to ensure that artificial intelligence is friendly to humans. And concerning the Internet, he admitted that its “new worlds are virtual and that any escape may be more imaginary than real.”
But he ignores some more-pressing tech-based concerns. In 2019 he said that “most of the jobs that could have been automated were automated a long time ago; most of the jobs that are left are weirdly immune to automation.” Couldn’t a more Thielian society become more susceptible to automation? In 2009, Thiel thought the Internet could, at worst, provide false refuge from the world; what of the technology-enabled anomie that has divorced humans from one another and reality? Thiel is nowadays concerned with obesity. Good for him; has he considered abuse of technology as a cause?
Thiel once wrote that, while it was once thought we’d soon have four-day workweeks, ours is essentially unchanged. What of the growing number of workforce dropouts, enabled by prosperity’s very largesse? Thiel told economist Tyler Cowen in 2015 that he was optimistic about (“long on”) the future of Japan; what of the apparent inability of Japan to reproduce itself? Thiel wrote wistfully in Zero to One about the demise of “cults” as a religious phenomenon. What of certain cults, directly enabled (QAnon) and even inspired (Simulation Theory) by the Internet, that have proliferated as part of a broader, digital autonomy–inflected trend of “do-it-yourself” religion that has weakened existing organized orthodoxies and institutions?
Dissatisfied with what Silicon Valley has done, Thiel wants more to get his desired future. But a utopia for him and people like him might be a dystopia for others. Witness what social media have already unleashed. Even non-Luddites can acknowledge drawbacks to certain forms of progress, particularly if it’s pursued heedlessly.
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Peter Thiel has an ambiguous relationship to conservatism. Start with the principles of the Founding. In Zero to One, he allows that California’s and Alaska’s both having two senators despite vast differences in population “may be a feature, not a bug” — a vaguely positive defense. He thinks it won’t change, however, and he does not see our contemporary debates as “big questions.” That’s a blasé attitude, given an activist Left opposed to this feature of our constitutional order, as well as to other features. But for Thiel, the Founders’ regime itself seems either an obstruction to solving our real problems or a ticking time bomb, flawed from its origin. In a 2004 speech (adapted as an essay in 2007) he called this regime “low but solid” and lamented the “political paralysis embedded in” its original design.
This could explain why Thiel’s work contains paeans to state power, the New Deal, and other oddities for someone who describes himself as a libertarian. It could also explain why he now thinks a belief in American exceptionalism has blinded conservatives, leading to a country that’s “exceptionally overweight.” He continues: “We are exceptionally addicted to opioids. It is exceptionally expensive to build infrastructure here, and we are exceptionally un-self-critical.”
For Thiel, harsher lenses of inquiry are preferable, whose connection to or admiration for the history or principles associated with America itself is ambiguous at best. It’s better, he says, to “ask how does our country stack up against other countries, how does it compare,” even if that means being “extremely critical” of the U.S.
While Thiel believes that American exceptionalism wrongly preoccupies the Right, he believes that identity politics wrongly preoccupies the Left. In 2019 he described the latter as “a kind of psychosocial hypnotic magic trick that’s been played on the population to distract us.” So he tries to ignore its conflicts with conservatism. In his 2016 RNC speech, he called the culture war “fake.” He elaborated:
When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?
Speaking with Dowd after the 2016 election, Thiel expanded on his indifference to conservative concerns. He said he didn’t think the socially conservative Mike Pence would inspire much movement in that area, because “stuff has just shifted.” He also showed little concern about Roe v. Wade and claimed he’s unsure “people even care about the Supreme Court.”
Thiel may not care about such things, or even oppose caring about them; he has donated to initiatives supporting the legalization of marijuana and of gay marriage. But debates concerning the Constitution, transgenderism (remarkable, how things continue to “shift”), the Supreme Court, and many other topics matter. Identity politics is not merely a “distraction.” It is an alternative worldview the Left advances; transgenderism and critical race theory are two current incarnations.
There are conservative alternatives to Thiel’s indifference. Florida governor Ron DeSantis argues for action, not resignation. “The goal is not to just lose ground more slowly,” DeSantis recently said. “The goal is to regain ground in an offensive direction.” Republicans nationwide, including DeSantis, have passed bills addressing transgenderism and limiting critical race theory.
To Thiel, these are imaginary battles in our “fake” culture war. Our real problems are economic. Solve them and the culture war disappears. As he put it in a Stanford lecture, “If you’ve got economic growth, you can solve most problems.” But at his own peril Thiel ignores moral conflicts deeper than his worldview. As DeSantis said, “You can have a successful economy, but if the underpinnings of the culture are being torn apart, I don’t think that’s a society that will be very successful.”
Peter Thiel has other concerns. Such as immortality. Is it a surprise that someone who urges conservatives not to be concerned with transgenderism is simultaneously intrigued by the possibilities of transhumanism? Both reject bodily limitations. This is another Thiel idiosyncrasy: He doesn’t want to die. In Zero to One, he laments that “today our society is permeated by the twin ideas that death is both inevitable and random.” And when pressed on the matter by Dowd, he replied, “Why is everyone else so indifferent about their mortality?”
Immortality is an ancient desire. Some have sought it literally; they have failed. Others have sought it in their accomplishments, their legacies, their offspring — acts of conscious humility connecting them both to their inheritance and to their posterity. Thiel wants more. But if he loathes stagnation, he might dislike immortality. Someone so apparently obsessed with The Lord of the Rings — his favorite novel, quoted in Zero to One, and the source of many of his companies’ names — should know better. Maybe Thiel hasn’t read The Silmarillion, the collection of Middle-Earth’s prehistory as conceived by J. R. R. Tolkien, compiled and edited by his son Christopher. It would show him what ruin the men of Númenor invited by rejecting just precepts in favor of seeking immortality — and what stagnation they invited en route.
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Christ offered immortality by fashioning out of mortality a remedy to mortality itself; this isn’t enough for Peter Thiel. He is, after all, a self-admittedly “somewhat heterodox” Christian. In a 2015 conversation with economist Tyler Cowen, he mused on the possibility of a “Straussian Christ,” and he seems to have been more influenced by the esoteric theories of René Girard, his Stanford professor, than by that man’s Christian orthodoxy. He has a similarly heterodox solution for politics: to fashion out of politics an escape from politics itself — with himself at the center, if possible, in a manner more ambitious than the familiar cliché of a businessman who thinks business success translates easily to political success.
Rarely is Thiel so blunt. But there are hints. His boredom with the present he must inhabit. His painstaking imagining of a future he deems superior. And his apocalyptic politics, in which mankind teeters on the edge of oblivion. In 2011, he told The New Yorker’s George Packer that he believes society faces an “increasingly volatile trajectory.” Last year, he warned that failure to power through stagnation may lead to mankind’s “stumbling into the apocalypse.”
An apocalyptic politics seeks extremes. It has led Peter Thiel to entertain the notion that things are so dire as to require escaping from politics altogether. But he can’t seem to decide what that entails. In 2004, he stressed that “one cannot unilaterally escape from all politics.” Yet five years later, he proclaimed that, “in our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ‘social democracy.’” But then, in 2014’s Zero to One, he declared that “there is no secession from society.”
Thiel’s actions suggest he has now decided to work within society. So far, this has meant engaging in politics as ordinary rich people do. But occasionally, glimpses of something grander emerge. Zero to One’s encomia for founders of new enterprises seem sufficiently grandiose as to transcend the merely entrepreneurial. “A unique founder,” he writes, “can make authoritative decisions, inspire strong personal loyalty, and plan ahead for decades.” He does caution that “the single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind.” But what else to expect of such a person when, as Thiel admits, the companies that create new technology often resemble feudal monarchies more than “modern” organizations?
Or consider this cryptic remark, from the same 2009 essay in which Thiel dismissed politics as a lost cause:
We are in a deadly race between politics and technology. The future will be much better or much worse, but the question of the future remains very open indeed. We do not know exactly how close this race is, but I suspect that it may be very close, even down to the wire. Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.
Who might that be?
In a recent New Yorker profile of Thiel, Benjamin Wallace-Wells rightly sees a domineering spirit in such comments. “The heightened vision of what a single leader can do, the veneration for more ancient and direct forms of leadership, the praise for authoritative decision-making and disdain for bureaucracies—it’s a short hop from here to the Donald Trump of ‘I alone can fix it.’” Trump said that at the 2016 RNC, at which Thiel also spoke. But for a man who had abandoned Trump by 2020 and referred to his campaign as the S.S. Minnow (the doomed vessel of Gilligan’s Island) to have believed Trump was this figure all along strains credulity. Likelier is that Thiel welcomed Trump’s disruption of a politics that had become “too boring,” as he said to Dowd. Perhaps something else could emerge amid the chaos.
Ideally, a bigger role for Peter Thiel. Maybe the California-based alt-right/neoreactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin, known as Mencius Moldbug, got close to Thiel’s mark in his call to reorganize American government as a corporatocracy with a dictator-like CEO. Yarvin is a reputed associate of Thiel; it’s not hard to guess the kind of person Yarvin would have lead such a government. “It’s easy to say ‘put Elon [Musk] in charge, he’ll figure it out,’ and he might well,” he said when prompted to pick. But Buzzfeed reported that Yarvin told Milo Yiannopoulos that he and Thiel watched the 2016 election results together and that Yarvin considers Thiel “fully enlightened” — albeit playing things “very carefully.”
For now, Thiel has declined explicit power himself, instead sowing ideological fruit with his dollars through many pursuits. It was harder to discern a clear strategy to Thiel’s actions in the past, though perhaps his donation to the congressional campaign of Sean Eldridge, the husband of Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes who tried and failed to carpetbag his way into an upstate New York congressional seat, was instructive. At any rate, it is now easier to discern. It seems largely to involve supporting would-be surrogates, such as Masters, in the political sphere. One suspects that Thiel’s donation relates more to Masters than to the state of Arizona.
Wallace-Wells’s description of Thiel’s coterie is incomplete, but useful:
There is no obvious party line among the Thielists, but they tend to share a couple of characteristics. They are interested in championing outré ideas and causes, and they are members of an American élite who nevertheless emphasize, in their politics, how awful élites have been for ordinary Americans.
These people won’t lack ideas; Thiel himself doesn’t. Nor is Thielism entirely self-serving. Some aspects fit Trumpism well enough. Beyond the more-or-less consonance of “Make America Great Again” with Thielism, there was also Thiel’s relative contempt for globalization and trade. In his telling, globalization involves merely copying; innovating involves truly creating. There is some good in Thielism. Thiel’s awakening not merely to the military threat posed by China but also to its totalitarian technological vision for the future is welcome. His disdain for meritocracy, credentialism, higher education, and political correctness and his support for free speech appear salutary.
But in light of his broader worldview, these intersections of Thielism with sense can seem coincidental. Take free speech and political correctness. In 2019, Thiel called political correctness “the greatest problem in our society” because, while politics is not necessarily paramount, “if you can’t even have debates about politics, then you’re not allowed to think about anything at all.” So far, so good. But Thiel seems to think of speech primarily as a means of expanding the range of acceptable discourse. This seems dubious as a sole criterion, rendering one susceptible to strange or even bad ideas that appear new or energetic (such as, perhaps, the alt-right). Thiel’s own remarks reveal the superficiality of this, when he says that insufficient free speech means we can’t say we like “the man with the strange hairdo” or “the mean grandmother.” Bold stuff. Meanwhile, Thiel’s statements don’t evince much care for, say, beleaguered Christian baker Jack Phillips, the target of repressive legal and political actions against his right to operate a business by his conscience. Free speech, as with so many other ideas, seems to Thiel merely a weapon.
So even though Peter Thiel has decided to align more with the Right than with the Left, the Right should not forsake all wariness of him. “Deconstructing the corrupt institutions that have falsely claimed to pursue” what our civilization needs may sound good, and it may even be necessary, to an extent. But when Thiel says this, it’s worth wondering for whom the deconstructing would be done. “I’ll pick on Google a little bit here, for reasons you might understand,” Thiel said, to audience laughter, at the 2019 National Conservatism conference, referring to what is now a business rival of his when calling for a federal investigation of possible Big Tech collusion with China. He made similar calls as recently as this past April. Whatever the merits of such a step (and they may be considerable), it is worth noting that, in 2019, Palantir, a software company that he co-founded and for which he currently serves as chairman, was flush with government contracts. It would become more so.
When Thiel and Thielists complain, on platforms built from Silicon Valley wealth, about elite depredation, one sees nothing so much as the familiar abuse of “populism” by status- and power-seeking would-be avatars of popular discontent, who would turn the purported vox populi into a license to aggrandize themselves and to do what they wanted to in the first place, conveniently — and, if they had their druthers, irrefutably — calling it all the people’s will. It is a proposition as logically fraught as its believers think it could be electorally potent — if successfully achieved. How it fits into the constitutional order is far less certain.
Wariness of Thiel is not a defense of the status quo, but rather a skepticism of his preferred deviation from it. Mankind’s future may indeed depend on further innovation. But such a future ought not lose sight of human nature amid technological innovation, of the constitutional order amid social and political upheaval, and of serious moral questions amid changing material circumstances. A Thielian future threatens to leave such things behind. Conservatives believe, as Calvin Coolidge did, that certain things, such as the principles of our Founding, are final: “If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.” Thiel’s relationship to such patriotic notions is at best uncertain. No amount of money should make conservatives forget that.