Peter Thiel and his buddies really feel they not belong to our species.
Advert Coverage
Peter Thiel speaks at The Cambridge Union on Might 8, 2024, in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire.(Nordin Catic / Getty Photographs for The Cambridge Union)
Amongst plutocratic reactionaries, Peter Thiel, who made his fortune as a cofounder of PayPal, is a trendsetter. In 2016, even billionaires who have been hostile to liberalism and shared Thiel’s views on the need of radically lowering authorities to empower huge enterprise have been hesitant to assist Donald Trump, seeing the candidate’s populism as a risk to the established order. Thiel himself knew that betting on Trump was of venture—however it was a wager he thought was not simply sensible however essential. For a few years, as he makes clear in a prolonged interview with Ross Douthat in The New York Occasions revealed final Thursday, Thiel has frightened that Western civilization had entered a interval of long-term stagnation within the Nineteen Seventies which is able to proceed until there’s a radical shake-up. This stagnation has many dimensions: decrease financial development, fewer world-changing scientific discoveries, and a normal cultural malaise.
Trump, Thiel hoped, would at the very least open up a dialog about why progress was stalled. This was, he admits, “a preposterous fantasy.” Though his political investments haven’t fairly paid off in overcoming stagnation as he’d hoped, Thiel continued to put money into politicians—a few of whom have been elevated to the nationwide stage due to his largesse (he was a notable patron of Vice President JD Vance).
Thiel’s evaluation of stagnation as requiring a radical right-wing political flip has additionally had a profound affect on his friends in Silicon Valley, who to better and lesser levels now share his worldview. They is likely to be extra circumspect than Thiel about how carefully they’re prepared to align with figures like Trump and Vance, however they appear to have been gained over to his broader evaluation.
In keeping with Thiel, he’s had debates about his stagnation thesis with Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) in 2012, enterprise capitalist Marc Andreessen in 2013, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2014. All three first rejected the concept stagnation is an issue, however, Thiel claims, “have, to various levels, up to date and adjusted.” This shift, he asserts, is “deeply linked” to the flip of Silicon Valley elite away from supporting mainstream Democrats corresponding to Barack Obama and towards embracing in various levels the Trump agenda.
The concept of stagnation is itself not an absurd one—nor inherently reactionary. Many left-wing historians and economists (notably the late Eric Hobsbawm in his magisterial 1994 research The Age of Extremes and the financial historian Robert Brenner in his essential 2006 e-book The Economics of International Turbulence) have analyzed a “lengthy downturn” that started within the early Nineteen Seventies when the most important capitalist nations entered a interval of slower technological innovation and decrease financial development. With a view to roll again the labor victories of the postwar period (which had turn out to be tougher to justify within the wake of falling income), American elites each empowered finance capital (resulting in a sequence of bubbles) and embraced deindustrialization, with many industries shifting to the International South (notably China).
Present Concern
Even when one doesn’t settle for each level made by Hobsbawm, Brenner, or comparable Marxist thinkers, their evaluation at the very least has a sturdy foundation in political financial system and materials actuality. Against this, Thiel has a bizarrely cultural evaluation of stagnation that doesn’t even move the snort take a look at. The Western world, he claims, entered into 5 a long time of anemic development due to the counterculture of the Nineteen Sixties. In keeping with Thiel, “in my telling of the historical past of the Nineteen Seventies…the hippies did win. We landed on the moon in July of 1969, Woodstock began three weeks later and, with the good thing about hindsight, that’s when progress stopped and the hippies gained.” Thiel provides that “everybody turned as deranged as Charles Manson.”
Due to the hippies, says Thiel, Western powers embraced an ideology of peace and security that stalled technological development.
Extra lately, the environmental motion has taken maintain, which blocks progress much more. Thiel refers to local weather change activist Greta Thunberg because the Antichrist. He’s not being metaphorical on this description, since he makes clear that he believes the biblical account of the Antichrist is to be taken as a literal depiction of the risks going through humanity. Thiel says that “within the seventeenth century, I can think about a Dr. Strangelove, Edward Teller-type particular person taking up the world. In our world, it’s much more prone to be Greta Thunberg.”
That is all an excessive amount of for even so conservative a determine as Ross Douthat, who not unreasonably objects, “Greta Thunberg is on a ship within the Mediterranean, protesting Israel.”
One might add that the hippies didn’t win within the Nineteen Sixties; Richard Nixon did. After Nixon, Reagan and Thatcher gained and have been the dominant figures of our age. Their resolution to the issue of stagnation is in reality the identical as Thiel’s: deregulation and decrease taxes for the wealthy. That is additionally the method Donald Trump has adopted along with his “Large Stunning Invoice” now making its method by the Senate.
Reagan and Thatcher have been politically profitable, remaking even their center-left opponents corresponding to Invoice Clinton and Tony Blair into celebrants of streamlined authorities. However this political success has not in reality solved the issue of stagnation, which stays as extreme, by Thiel’s account, because it has ever been. Thiel and his cohorts have gotten all the things they need politically, however that has nonetheless failed to resolve the important thing drawback of our time. The truth that he nonetheless advocates a failed financial program suggests the deeper stagnation is in his personal thoughts.
Advert Coverage
Well-liked
“swipe left under to view extra authors”Swipe →
Since politics has failed, Thiel and the opposite plutocrats are additionally toying with one other resolution: secession from society and the human species. Thiel has lengthy been an advocate of varied post-human technological options that may permit him and his fellow plutocrats to free themselves from the stagnant mass of humanity: cryonics (to beat loss of life), sea-steading (to create sea-board libertarian utopias), colonizing Mars, and synthetic intelligence.
In a telling second within the interview, Douthat asks Thiel what he feels about the way forward for the species:
Douthat: It appears very clear to me that plenty of individuals deeply concerned in synthetic intelligence see it as a mechanism for transhumanism—for transcendence of our mortal flesh—and both some form of creation of a successor species or some form of merger of thoughts and machine.
Do you assume that’s all irrelevant fantasy? Or do you assume it’s simply hype? Do you assume individuals are elevating cash by pretending that we’re going to construct a machine god? Is it hype? Is it delusion? Is it one thing you are worried about?
Thiel: Um, yeah.
Douthat: I feel you would like the human race to endure, proper?
Thiel: Uh——
Douthat: You’re hesitating.
Thiel: Nicely, I don’t know. I’d—I’d——
Douthat: It is a lengthy hesitation!
Thiel: There’s so many questions implicit on this.
Douthat: Ought to the human race survive?
Thiel: Sure.
Douthat: OK.
Thiel: However I additionally would love us to radically resolve these issues.
Thiel goes on to speak about his hopes that know-how will permit humanity to resolve the issue of loss of life and obtain the long-held promise of Christianity of everlasting life and transcendence.
Within the interview, Thiel additionally alludes to Robert Heinlein’s science fiction basic The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966). In that novel, the colonists of the moon, disgusted by the corruption of earth people, launch a libertarian revolution underneath the slogan “There’s No Such Factor as a Free Lunch” with the help of AI.
Listening to Peter Thiel, it’s exhausting to flee the conclusion that he and his fellow billionaires are sick of the human species. They need to escape the inferior beings that encompass them. Lately, Mark Zuckerberg has radically in the reduction of his philanthropypreferring to provide his cash to STEM analysis quite than serving to poor individuals. In the meantime, Jeff Bezos has principally rented the town of Venice to throw a multimillion-dollar wedding ceremony attended by his fellow plutocrats, an oligarchical orgy.
If the billionaires are so decided on quitting humanity, maybe it will be finest to provide them what they need and sponsor a mission to Mars so humanity can rid itself of them.
Jeet Lord
Jeet Heer is a nationwide affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He additionally pens the month-to-month column “Morbid Signs.” The creator of In Love with Artwork: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Artwork Spiegelman (2013) and Candy Lechery: Opinions, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for quite a few publications, together with The New Yorker, The Paris Evaluation, Virginia Quarterly Evaluation, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.
Extra from
Jeet Heer 
Mamdani laid out the technique. Now the left ought to observe his instance and first Ritchie Torres, Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, and so many others.
Jeet Lord
Donald Trump killed the anti-war proper—however presents an opportunity to revive the anti-war left.
Jeet Lord
America’s TACO president must concern in style backlash as a lot as he does hawks.
Jeet Lord
The president is fickle, feckless, and simply swayed—which makes him a straightforward mark for militarists.
Jeet Lord
The quickest method for america to turn out to be fascist is by politicizing the army.
Jeet Lord
No! Hell no! By no means! The enemy of your enemy remains to be a corrupt plutocrat who needs to destroy democracy.
Jeet Lord
