Peter Thiel on Political Theology

Highlights

• 2024-12-10 13:52 German legal theorist Carl Schmitt then picked it up and said, it’s something that everyone needs. They all need a political theology. What does the term mean to you? Peter Thiel: Well, it’s a bit of a fuzzy, broad concept, but maybe sort of to motivate it as a contrast, I think that in late modernity, we’re often living in this world of hyper specialization where you can’t think about the big picture. And it’s sort of like, I don’t know, it’s like Adam Smith’s pin factory on steroids is sort of our world.

• 2024-12-10 13:51 Let’s say I’m trying to make sense of your political theology. So I recall you saying in a recent talk you consider yourself religious but not spiritual.

• 2024-12-10 13:52 And that strikes me as quite a calvinist point. So if you put aside predestination and think of Calvinism as insisting we know nothing about heaven, so it’s an aggregation of man’s power to claim to know about heaven that’s related to your critique of the left, the notion that we don’t know anything about heaven. It also means you can’t really be spiritual. That’s also a kind of arrogation. Isn’t the consistent Peter Thiel really a calvinist thinker?

• 2024-12-10 13:51 What is it you think that Schmidt missed? That’s very important?

• 2024-12-10 13:51 Peter Thiel: I’ll just sort of do one insight that I think is powerful and then sort of what’s wrong about that? One of his books was the concept of the political and sort of what defines politics. And it’s sort of this. It’s some of this division of friends and enemies then that somehow is really foundational. And you shouldn’t get sidetracked with all these other things.

• 2024-12-10 13:51 And then all these interesting ways you could apply this. There’s sort of a 1980s Reagan coalition question I always like to ask people where you had this. The Reagan coalition was somehow the free market libertarians, the defense hawks and the social conservatives. And so if you ask, what does the millionaire and the general and the priest, what do they actually have in common? We just sort of imagine these three people are seated at a dinner table and they’re having dinner, and what do they actually talk about?

• 2024-12-10 13:51 It’s really hard to come up with an answer. And yet the coalition worked incredibly well. And the answer, I submit that they have in common is they’re anti communist and they have a common enemy. And that was incredibly powerful. It was, in some ways, my formative political idea as a teenager, junior high school, high school, late seventies, early eighties, was anti communism.

• 2024-12-10 13:50 Is Schmidt missing out on a certain possible cyclicality in history? So the notion that liberalism will collapse in the Weimar Germany of the 1920s, obviously that was the correct prediction. But if you reappear in West Germany of 1948, it was a completely incorrect prediction. And just as well, liberalism had collapsed leading up to World War one. It tends to come back. Why isn’t the cyclical perspective the correct one?

• 2024-12-10 13:51 Man, that’s a big question, but I don’t know. I think you can stress the aspects that are timeless and eternal. I prefer to stress the aspects that are one time and world historical. I think that in some sense, every moment in history only happens once.

• 2024-12-10 13:51 And, you know, I think there is some kind of a meaning to history. I think it has a certain type of linearity to it. I think that is sort of the, let’s say, the judeo christian view of history as distinct from, let’s say, the classical greco roman one. I don’t know if you can have a concept of history that’s cyclical. I don’t know if you look at Thucydides, where it’s this great period of peace that leads to this great war between Athens and Sparta.

• 2024-12-10 13:51 So the periclean age, some of them gives way to this great conflict. And then people came back to studying Thucydides right after World War one, because there’s some certain parallel 100 years of peace between the napoleonic wars, and then it led to this great conflict. But there’s nothing particular in the history. None of the details matter in Thucydides. He makes up all the speeches and so on.

• 2024-12-10 13:50 And then, you know, you contrast this with something like the book of Daniel in the Bible, where it’s a succession of four kingdoms, and it is a one time world history where everything that happens is unique, not to be repeated in. And there’s sort of a sense in which I would say the real first historian was Daniel, and Thucydides isn’t even close. And then, yeah, we talked off the settle. But what about the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire? And isn’t the European Union sort of like the Roman Empire?

• 2024-12-10 13:50 If you identify too much as one thing that can go very wrong, if you think of the catacon as the thing that restrains the one world state or that restrains the Antichrist, anything that’s sort of like the opposite, this is sort of a girardian cut, is always going to be mimetically entangled, and so it’s going to have sort of this parallelism. And so there’s always a risk that the catacon becomes the Antichrist. The original anti. The proto Antichrist was Nero. Claudius, the good emperor, was the catacon.

• 2024-12-10 13:50 He was restraining Nero. But then at some point, you know, Nero’s the opposite of Claudius, but they’re both roman emperors. Or, you know, you could say that in the middle of the 20th century, I don’t know, from, let’s say, 1949 to 1989. I would identify the catacon as anti communism. I would identify communism as the ideology of the Antichrist in the 20th century.

• 2024-12-10 13:50 And anti communism was this, you know, it was not. What stopped communism was not, you know, the United States couldn’t have done it. It was not just one country. It was not like some libertarian debating society was, you know, something was, like, pretty violent, pretty. Pretty hard to morally justify, not really that Christian that sort of had this unifying effect.

• 2024-12-10 13:50 Girard liked to always say that Christ was the first political atheist, because on the level of the political order, Christ says that he’s the son of God, son of the father. There’s a way you can go into trinitarian metaphysics, but the political interpretation of this is that Caesar Augustus, the son of the divinized Caesar, somehow that’s not exactly the son of God.

• 2024-12-10 13:49 That’s a way to really control things. And if I sort of fast forwarded to, let’s say, Silicon Valley in the early 21st century, it’s way too biased towards the math people. I don’t know if it’s a french revolution thing or a russian sort of straussian secret cabal control thing where you probably tries it, but that’s the thing that seems deeply unstable. And that’s what I would bet on getting reversed, where, you know, it’s like the place where math ability, like, you know, it’s sort of. It’s the thing that’s the test for everything, right? It’s like, if you want to go to medical school, okay, we weed people out through physics and calculus. And, like, I’m not sure that’s really correlated with your, you know, I don’t know, your dexterity as a neurosurgeon. I don’t really want someone operating in my brain to be, you know, doing prime number of factorizations in their head while they’re operating on my brain or something like that. In the late eighties, early nineties, I had sort of a chess bias because I was a pretty good chess player. And so my chess bias was, you should just test everyone on chess ability, and that should be the gating factor. Why even do math? Why not just chess? And that got undermined by. By the computers in 1997. And isn’t that what’s going to happen to math? And isn’t that a long overdue rebalancing? Of our society?

• 2024-12-09 15:38 And so once you see how satanic the government is, how satanic taxes are, other things besides the governments do, it will have this unraveling effect.

• 2024-12-10 13:52 Tyler Cowen: Would you bet on open source AI? If decentralization is great it should have more dynamic properties, should innovate more, should be safer as many other virtues.

• 2024-12-10 13:52 Peter Thiel: I don’t quite know if that’s the main variable that’s going to push the centralization or decentralization with it but yeah, there probably some version of it that would be helpful. I don’t know.

• 2024-12-10 13:52 The Linux versus Microsoft precedent not sure that changed anything that much on the. On the level of the operating system. Thank you. When do you think humans are going to destroy themselves and do you think AI is going to do it? I don’t think these things are written in stone.

• 2024-12-10 13:52 I’m not a calvinist. I’m not a p doom Ea East Bay rationalist. I think it’s, it’s up to us. But as I said, I’m much more worried about the humans trying to stop the AI than the AI destroying us. A force that’s powerful enough to stop the AI is probably a force that’s powerful enough to destroy the world too.

• 2024-12-09 17:06 It was like, you know, I think one thing she said was, there can be nobody more revolutionary than a factory worker, that nobody can be more revolutionary than a proletarian.