Here are some more sustained observations on the Peter Thiel moment. It might be a public airing of the highest form of libertarianism and a telling piece of evidence that our techno-brainpower is now securely located in Silicon Valley. Certainly Peter soars above Zuckerberg, Gates, and Bezos and is, in fact, doing less than they are to screw up America. He’s in a different universe from the Koch brothers. But he endorses, as I’ve said before, the impulse of Google toward total control of nature and human nature. But the goal is not merely profit. For businesses, money is either important or all-important, Peter explains. The Silicon Valley startup monopolies are moving beyond the dog-eat-dog world of the competitive quest for survival toward higher ethical goals and finally toward the overcoming of chance or luck with the sustainability of the the singular existence of each and every person in mind. If we’re being manipulated, it’s for our good. That’s why there’s nothing more glorious than founding a startup these days, even though we don’t honor those founders’ greatness in the way we still honor our political founders.

UPDATE: So I got a tweet from some Straussian group praising Peter Thiel for hanging with the Straussians while still being able to think of himself. That praise might carry with it the unfortunate (and somewhat or more untrue) implication that being a Straussian means being unable to think outside the Strauss Box. I think my intention was to praise Thiel for using Straussian insights to serve his own purposes. Not only that, being a Straussian doesn’t mean having any definite orientation toward the modern techno-project of Bacon, Descartes, and the rest. I know one top Straussian who really does anticipate with hope the possible coming of a world characterized by indefinite longevity and in which the repression of moral virtue has almost become unnecessary. And I’m sure there are others. Many young Straussians, like much of the country, are moving in the left-libertarian direction. Straussian conservative isn’t a redundancy; those Straussians who are most reliably conservative bring more than Strauss to the table, so to speak. Think here of our friends Leon Kass and Yuval Levin, both of whom have their Straussian critics.

My appreciative criticism of Thiel is from, at most, an ambiguously Straussian point of view.