Peter Thiel: Insights from “The Straussian Moment“
Photography of Peter Thiel: © Gage Skidmore
“For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales”
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Locksley Hall”
People consider The Age of Enlightenment, often called the "Age of Reason" as a crucial step toward human development. Enlightenment was an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated Europe and ended the brutal period of religious warfare.
The Enlightenment often associated with values such as liberty, freedom, progress, and toleration shifted the human's focus toward pursuing happiness and knowledge obtained through reason. But Peter Thiel, the maverick and most famous contrarian in the world of technology, says the Enlightenment is the retreat.
Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal and Palantir, perhaps the world's most interesting technology investor, wrote the Straussian Moment in the early 2000s, partially in response to 9/11 but also to challenge the foundations of modern politics that have arisen from the achievements of the Enlightenment.
If you want to grasp better Peter Thiel’s world and understand his principles for the understanding world and capturing hidden knowledge, I encourage you to get familiar with my blog post on Thiel.
1. The Enlightenment’s mistake.
“You can distinguish the intellect and the will. The medievals believed in the weakness of the will but the power of the intellect. Modern people tend to believe in the power of the will and the weakness of the intellect.”
According to Thiel, the worst mistake made by Enlightenment was sweeping crucial questions under the carpet. To forget about the turbulent years of religious wars and social unrest, the “Age of Reason“ abandoned the important question of human nature or the power of faith.
Thiel, in “The Straussian Moment“ highlighted the ineffable trait of the Enlightenment of not being brave enough to ask hard questions, bringing up the figures of crucial philosophers, for example, John Locke.
“In the place of human nature, Locke leaves us with an unknowable “X.” This awareness of ignorance provides the low but solid ground on which the American Founding takes place. The human “X” may have certain wants and preferences, but nobody is in an authoritative position from which to challenge those desires.’
John Locke is one of the most influential philosophers and a key figure of the Enlightenment. His modern “liberal“ thoughts deeply influenced the Founding Fathers of the USA and gave fresh air, spreading the grasp of optimism around Europe. Locke pioneered the ideas of natural law or social contract.
Locke, among other Enlightenment philosophers, developed a concept of the social contract. According to their concept, the government was created through the consent of the people to be ruled by the majority. Social contract theory provides a rationale justification for the notion that legitimate state power should be derived from the consent of the majority of society.
And by Thiel’s explanation, the concept of the social contract is the central lie of the Enlightenment that allows avoiding asking hard questions about human nature, white-washing problematic and often violent character of human beings. Peter Thiel considers social contract as the main myth:
“The enlightenment always white-washes violence. There are many things we can’t think about under enlightenment reasoning, and one of them is violence itself. If you go to the anthropological myth of the enlightenment, it’s the myth of the social contract. So what happens when everybody is at everybody else’s throat? The enlightenment says that everybody in the middle of the crisis sits down, has a nice legal chat, and draws up a social contract. And maybe that’s the founding myth — the central lie — of the Enlightenment. Girard says something very different must have happened. When everybody is at everybody’s throat, the violence doesn’t just resolve itself, and maybe it gets channeled against a single scapegoat where the war of all against all became a war of all against one and somehow gets resolved in a very violent way. “
According to Thiel, the end of humanity would be marked by the definitive abandonment of all the hard questions, but there would no longer be any conflict.
2. Doubtful foundations of modern politics.
“From The Wealth of Nations on the right to Das Kapital on the left, and to Hegel and Kant and their many followers some- where in between, the brute facts of September 11 demand a reexamination of the foundations of modern politics. The openly intellectual agenda of this essay is to suggest what that reexamination entails.”
The shocking event of 9/11 left Thiel wondering what the West policymakers had gone wrong with, and he put forward several allegations. The crucial sin of policymakers was that they were highly naive with their view that enormous wealth transfer will unite the world.
An enormous amount of wealth was transferred to white elephant projects, bringing no economic development, and even in the best cases, money simply circulated back to the West, landing in Swiss bank accounts run by Third World dictators.
The problem with the above-mentioned approach is not only naive but also surface, ignoring to ask thought-provoking questions about human nature and accepting wealth as the main key to solving problems is just unreasonable. And this narrow perspective didn’t allow them to forecast the long-expected blow.
Thiel was asking:
“Are economic incentives in fact powerful enough to contain violence?“
Thiel says that the real problem goes much deeper than West policymakers used to think. He noticed that 9/11 didn’t come from starving peasants in Burkina Faso or from Tibetan yak herders earning less than a dollar a day.
The mastermind behind 9/11 was a man with a fortune estimated at $250 million, mostly made during the Saudi oil boom of the 1970s. Bin Laden was born in America. Thiel stated:
“The singular example of bin Laden and his followers has tendered incomplete the economically motivated political thought that has dominated the modern West.”
This state of avoiding difficult questions and working on white elephants in the hope that the world would unite could not last forever.
Thiel writes that the "unfolding confrontation between the West and Islam" is viewed very differently by the two sides. The Islamic side retains "a strong religious conception of reality" while the Western side doesn't.
By contrast, on the Western side (if it can even be called a side), there is great confusion over what the fighting is for, and why there should be a civilizational war at all. An outright declaration of war against Islam would be unthinkable; we much prefer to think of these measures as police actions against a few unusual criminal sociopaths who happen to blow up buildings. We are nervous about considering a larger meaning to the struggle, and even the staunchest Western partisans of war know that we no longer believe in the
9/11 forced the West to return to ask fundamental questions and took a side. Peter Thiel argues both capitalism and Enlightenment convinced us not to ask profound questions about the human condition and faith.
“When you get rid of faith, you end up in the world where there is no reason“
It white-washes violence and the state of human nature, while philosophers whom Thiel brought up in the essay have in common the view that human nature is always problematic, could be violent, and certainly, it’s not straightforward.
Thiel believes the event of 9/11 reveals that our Western political philosophy can no longer cope with our world of global violence, and we should rethink the doctrine of American exceptionalism. Start asking hard questions and stop blindly thinking that material wealth and white elephants can stop global violence and terrorism.
3. Insights from Common Knowledge.
In 2019 Peter Thiel had an insightful interview with Peter Robinson on Uncommon Knowledge. Their conversation went beyond the topics touched by “The Straussian Moment“, however, it is a great complement to the essay itself and for grasping a deeper understanding of the wide range of Peter Thiel's views.
Here are some quotes that I find meaningful:
On Intellect and will
“You can distinguish the intellect and the will. The medievals believed in the weakness of the will but the power of the intellect. Modern people tend to believe in the power of the will and the weakness of the intellect.”
On Enlightenment and modern mania of AI
“The mania we have around artificial intelligence is that it stands for the proposition that humans aren’t supposed to think. We want the machines to do the thinking, but it’s because we’re in a world where individuals aren’t supposed to have intellectual agency of any sort anymore. We don’t trust rationality.”
On Faith and Reason
“You don’t want faith to be unreasonable, and you don’t want it to be reasonable because then you could just use reason, so it’s a complicated question of how you get faith and reason to work together.”
On Future
“The future is something that has to be thought of in relatively concrete terms and it has to be different from the present. And only something that’s different from the present and very concrete can have any sort of charismatic force.”
Advice for 20-year-old self
“Think a lot harder about the future…try to think concretely what you want to do…there’s always a question, where is the frontier, where are some pockets of innovation where you can do some new things and not be in a crazed competition.”
Thiel ends the interview by noting that there is nothing automatic or deterministic about how history happens, and he expresses his views that economic growth plays a vital role in a country’s future.
Summary:
The Enlightenment and capitalism wish for religious questions to stay buried, but 9/11 forced them to the surface again. The adversarial nature of politics comes from these divisive religious questions. No amount of technological progress can make these questions irrelevant.
Thiel in “The Straussian Moment“ seems to try to pull people’s attention to these founding conditions in which civilizations are led to disorder by definitive abandonment of all the hard questions.
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