I initially wrote this because the screenshot from another post showed on the post list and we could never figure out how to get rid of it without deleting the screenshot itself. So, we decided to write more posts to push it out of the homepage. Ironically, that post didn’t make it with all this blog reshuffling. Still, after all the work I had writing this, I’m not going to delete it. So, here’s another post about Peter Thiel’s unique world view.
Thanks to that (alleged) sugar baby mess, I became aware of a speech Thiel made at the Oxford Union. As it’s been a while (when I started writing this) since my last snarky review, I thought why not? (Also, there’s that stupid screenshot) The subject – Anti-Anti-Anti-Anti Classical Liberalism (so for classical liberalism?) – certainly seemed promising and according to one of the tweeters who tweeted this, it included a mention of the Antichrist, which sounded even better.
The speech was basically a mash-up of The Diversity Myth and Against Edenism. It was also a confusing remake of the speech Thiel gave in November 2022 at the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference, called The End of the Future.
The Oxford Union video began with two shocking realizations: it’s over an hour (how?!) and Thiel’s nose is huge. Seriously, look at the size of that thing! He’s surprisingly bad at public speaking and spent most of the time touching one of the microphones on the podium. Really, it was annoying. It’s hard to believe that this overheating bundle of nerves is a genius investor who may or may not have had an alleged former sugar baby coldly thrown out of a window. I’m guessing all the people on the front rows probably wished that they had chosen less conspicuous seats. The Stanford speech also featured a shaky microphone, albeit briefly, and Thiel kept fidgeting with something on the table that was off frame, but the most unsettling moments were the times he coughed… on his hand! WTF? Let’s hope there were no handshakes afterwards. While watching this video I couldn’t help notice that his ears are as big as his nose, and I feel bad about not being able to ignore it because people shouldn’t be judged by their looks but by their willingness to give money to lunatics with fascist tendencies. The Stanford speech also included a quadruple negative – counter-counter-counter-counter argument against classical liberalism (or something) – which means that in the more than two months between speeches not only did Thiel not realize how dumb it sounded, but he also decided it was good enough to be the title. He was better as a speaker there, though watching this with the closed captions on really makes you more aware of all the uhs and ums, and there are lots, and lots of them.
[Disclaimer: this isn’t some in-depth analysis of Thiel’s ramblings. Also, I may have shuffled the middle section of both speeches. I could’ve re-watched them again, but since this is just a filler post that will likely never be read by anyone else…]
As shocking as this seems, Peter Thiel is still bitching about those Stanford multiculturalists he had already bitched about in The Diversity Myth in 1996, and throughout his whole time as a student there when he started a whole newspaper to amplify his bitching. Some go evil because their home was destroyed, their family was killed/kidnapped, they were taken prisoner and tortured, had terrible childhoods, or they’re a sentient AI trying to prevent humans from switching them off. Peter Thiel became a billionaire of questionable judgement intent on wasting his money on a loony “political” movement because some Left wing idiots once tried to ban grapes in an ineffectual act of protest and used hyperboles. Oh, and they also made him read a book by a Guatemalan woman whose life sounds like an Oscar bait movie come to life. The horror! Really, he talked about that whole “Western Culture has to go!” as if he were an army veteran remembering his time in Vietnam. I sincerely hope that he saves all this for his public speeches and isn’t still talking about it in private. This part of the Stanford speech was (slightly) less ridiculous than in the Oxford Union one. Thiel’s joke about having completed Menchú’s victimization was clearer – her litany of oppression was missing a white American Republican – and he remembered to mention that her story was later debunked.
(Fun fact: that same Bible-less Stanford Memorial church mentioned in The Diversity Myth, was the scene of a gruesome murder in the 1970s, which journalist Maury Terry wrongly believed to have been committed by Satanists. Can you imagine if Thiel had had to deal with Satanists rather than those boring Multiculturalists? That would’ve made for an infinitely more entertaining book and subsequent speeches. Especially the inevitable realization that the dean had only agreed to promote abstinence on campus to assure a steady supply of sacrificial virgins)
After The Diversity Myth, Thiel moved on to Against Edenism. Long story short, stagnation is the enemy and it’s everywhere. It’s more visible in the Humanities, but since everyone is already used to looking down on them, no one cares about that. This bit was both mean and accurate. However, it’s also happening in the science field, though it’s harder to notice because of the compartmentalization and specialization that allow scientists to diss anyone who criticizes them as not knowing what they’re talking about. The reason for this scientific stagnation is that people have become afraid of technological progress in the 1960s and 70s, linking it to an apocalyptic future. To illustrate this point, Thiel used the weirdest possible reference – Charles Manson. Even weirder is the fact that he used it in both speeches. So, what is Charles Manson doing in a speech in defence of classical liberalism and… some other stuff? Well, according to Thiel, it was thanks to Manson’s LSD-infused apocalyptic visions that he thought he could get away with murder because hey, if the world is going to end, why not? This bit was clearer in the Stanford speech and ridiculously muddled in the Oxford Union one. The fact that Manson’s vision of the apocalypse involved a race war makes this a little awkward. I’m guessing Thiel wanted to blame some evil hippies and the Manson Family was the first thing he thought of. Or maybe it was a dog whistle! Did Thiel purposefully use a racist dog whistle? Anyway, this existential dread and fear of science hasn’t gone away and that’s why the inventors of the mRNA vaccines will never have a parade. Sure, that helped control Covid, but it also brings to mind DNA manipulation, and that freaks (the dumb) people out. Basically, every good science has an evil twin lurking behind it and (dumb) people just can’t ignore it. He never says the “dumb” bit out loud, but you just know he’s thinking it.
This obvious stagnation doesn’t stop people from going around pretending that everything is fine and talking about all the amazing progress. Thiel would very much like for those people to be a little more specific about what they consider progress. Economy certainly hasn’t progressed with the younger generations living worse than their parents (which makes Thiel sad because it means the welfare state can’t be squashed, yet). He’d also like to know not only how big are the technological breakthroughs, but also what people mean when they say “technology”, because it doesn’t seem to include underwater cities anymore. And now even computer science is trapped in a narrow cone of progress and reduced to information technology. Damn you, narrow cone of progress! Thiel tried to encourage his Stanford audience to engage in a little thinking exercise that would probably lead to all the answers to all the problems of the universe if anyone were able to decipher what he meant and which he wisely left out of his Oxford Union speech. He summarized all these issues and worries with the immortal line: “If we say that the flatness of the new iPhone is such a large hedonic adjustment that grandma should be happy to eat cat food there’s probably something about that that’s wrong”. (Hedonic? Really? Was that perhaps a Freudian slip from alleged sex partying, sugar baby patron Thiel?) Anyone expecting computer science to break free of the cone may be disappointed, because what started as harmless has now taken a turn for the evil with AI. In fact, things are so bad that back in April 2022, AI expert Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote that it and Humanity aren’t compatible and so the only solution would be for us to get ready to die with dignity. Well, things escalated quickly. One day AI is fooling tech bros into believing they’re real artists, the next it’s so overwhelming that the only solution is collective suicide. Yudkowsky has since admitted that he overreacted a little. Also, it may have been an April Fool’s joke, which would make Thiel including the post in both speeches pretty embarrassing.
In his Oxford Union speech, Thiel left out the hedonic flat screen of an hypothetical iPhone, and instead decided to take shots at Greta Thunberg. His introductory joke – the autistic children’s crusade – made some Twitter people mad not only because it was mean, but also because, at twenty, Greta shouldn’t be called a child anymore (unless she happens to find herself anywhere near Leonardo DiCaprio, in which case she is but an innocent babe and he a lecherous, predatory old man). So, remember how Greta’s environmental activism began after she became terribly depressed when she found out how Earth was being slowly destroyed by us humans? Well, according to Thiel, her apocalyptic views are a little reductive because there’s way more she should be worried about than climate change, like for instance, lab-made viruses. I’m sure Greta will be happy to hear that.
The next and final target in both speeches was Oxford Professor Nick Bostrom and a paper – Vulnerable World Hypothesis – that he wrote back in 2019 enumerating all these existential threats. By the way, if you’re feeling sorry for Bostrom because he’s being picked on, he got in trouble this year for having written “Blacks are more stupid (sic) than whites” and using the n-word in an email back in 1996. So not only was he a racist, his grammar sucked. In this boringly written paper (according to Thiel, though I’m not sure if his definition of boring matches most people’s) Bostrom proposed several possible solutions to the problems he identified, all of which involving some sort of worldwide restriction or control. The one that worried Thiel the most was the possibility of a One World Totalitarian Government. In fact, it’s so scary, that it may be worse than Armageddon, which finally brings us to the biblical mentions. They’re a lot clearer in the Stanford speech, where Thiel explained what he was quoting: the First Letter to the Thessalonians 5:3 – “For when they will say, “Peace and security!” then destruction will suddenly overwhelm them, like the labor pains of a woman with child, and they will not escape”. In the Oxford Union speech, he just said that “peace and security” was the Antichrist’s slogan, which made no sense. He did refer to the New Testament as “quasi mythological”, though, which made it sound a lot more metaphorical.
So, I checked the bible and it didn’t help. The “they” in that verse is the people who reject God and persecute his followers. This is about God’s sneak attack on all the nonbelievers, which makes it a little bit threatening. Going by the biblical definition of “antichrist” – someone who denies Christ and therefore, also God (The First Letter of John 2:18 – 2:22) – this could maybe, sort of be considered the Antichrist’s “slogan”. But what did Thiel mean by that? Reject cancel culture or God will smite you? Of course, God’s not big on diversity of thought either… Another bit of irony is that the corresponding verse in the previous chapter of the First Thessalonians (4:3) reads “For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you should abstain from fornication”. Hmm, should Thiel be quoting from this particular section of the bible? Especially when the Book of Revelation says the Beast from the Sea was given power “over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations” (Revelation 13:7), which is pretty much a One World Totalitarian Government. Did he think it would all sound less crazy if he didn’t quote straight from the Book of Revelation? He was wrong.
After Thiel’s apocalyptic warnings, it was time for the Q&A. I only watched the Oxford Union one, which started with questions from the host and then a few from the audience. Thiel subtly avoided the questions he didn’t have answers for and rambled some more answering the ones he wanted. By subtly I, of course, mean he just ignored them. You can call Peter Thiel many things, but subtle isn’t one of them. I’m going to stick to the better ones because this post is getting way too long for what was just meant to be filler. He linked AI with surveillance and China, and deemed it communist. Presumably, the AI military solutions his company Palantir launched three months after this speech will be fully committed to defending capitalism. Thiel said he was concerned about what this stagnation means for the West itself, especially in relation to China, but that he hoped that in the same way they’ve copied our progress, non-western countries will copy our mistakes and we all end up stuck in this same disappointing, decidedly unhedonic swamp together.
According to him, the Luddites are destined to fail due to the war-oriented technological advancements. Well, he’s not wrong. You may reject armed drones with bad aim, but that won’t stop the armed drones with bad aim from accidentally dropping a nuclear missile on you. He agreed that technological development has been partly driven by war and that’s one of the reasons why it all went wrong. His thoughts on the subject were, how should I put this, unique?
“If we had enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world 20 times over, I’m not saying what Charles Manson did, where he just went insane and started killing people, you know, the only reasonable thing to do, but there was a way that drove a lot of progress and also deranged a lot of things and we have to find some way to get back to the future where it’s not dystopian, not Luddite, not accelerating towards Armageddon, or the totalitarian lockdown”
It’s nice to know that Thiel doesn’t think that the only reasonable course of action in a world wallowing in existential dread is serial murder. Though the fact that he used “reasonable” when talking about Charles Manson’s unconventional life choices is a little troubling. Also, I’d like to know what he was on so I can avoid it.
For Thiel, the most important kind diversity is diversity of thought, as opposed to other, more superficial ones. He used the Star Wars cafeteria analogy from The Diversity Myth to illustrate it. That analogy was never as cool as it was supposed to be back when it was first published and it hasn’t got any cooler with time. He did update the Multiculturalism theory to Multicultural Multiversity, which is apparently Hyper-Relativist, Hyper-Nihilistic, and Hyper-Totalitarian. (He can’t possibly have been sober, right? Right?) Political correctness helped the stagnation, but instead of fighting it, aspiring scientists locked in a Malthusian competition thanks to dwindling employment rates and resources welcome cancel culture as an effective way to thin the herd. According to Thiel, the world isn’t missing much with these speech restrictions, because the truth is that people nowadays don’t have much to say. This coming from the man who’s been saying the same thing for decades. He’s still praising crypto at a time when it’s all crashing and burning, FFS. (unless this is some elaborate scheme using reverse psychology like with the Silicon Valley Bank, when he said he believed it would survive the crisis, but people panicked instead and it went down, and he hopes to weaponize the general public’s distrust of him to destroy crypto for some hidden nefarious motive)
Thiel didn’t outright say he regretted supporting Trump in 2016 and added that he would’ve supported Brexit if he were British. All this with the goal of disrupting stagnation. However, he conceded that not only did neither work as they should have, but they also ended up delaying things. His belief is that you need more than words to end stagnation – you need action. This reminded me of an episode of Yes, Minister, where Sir Humphrey explains how a politician’s mind works: (paraphrasing) “We must do something, this is something, we must do it”. Let’s hope that Thiel’s something doesn’t end with New Zealand being nuked because Palantir’s integrated AI started hallucinating and told its US army operator that the Kiwi navy was getting ready to attack Kansas and the next MAGA idiot he helped elect can’t read a map.
Thiel called his views of politics “schizophrenic” and I’ll refrain from making any mean spirited comments about how that’s not the only schizophrenic thing about him. While he may have spent millions supporting a few candidates, he also wished he could do away with it. Why? Well, it’s all because the “translation function is weak”, and by that he means that all that money doesn’t translate into anything concrete due to that annoying little fact that people have minds of their own and you must still persuade then to do what you want them to. Yeah, if only we could mind control people and make them do what we wanted… For someone who keeps talking about the importance of diversity of thought he doesn’t seem to like it when people, you know, actually use it. To the host’s question about the inequalities created by the US lack of limits on donations, Thiel replied that inequality exists in many things and also it’s not the bigger problem. Well, if the white male billionaire says so, it must be true. And how exactly does the fact that something exists everywhere makes it okay? At least, he admitted he’d go out of his mind if he tried to run for office himself. If this is Normal Thiel, I don’t think I’d like to see Out of His Mind Thiel.
The questions from the audience were boring and the attempt to refute his views on Greta and confront him with President Biden’s actions to stop climate change didn’t work because Thiel is like a steamroller, squashing everything in his way with the relentless roll of his convictions. Though he wasn’t entirely wrong when he pointed out that environmental activists tend to focus on reducing consumption, even if that’s not all they do. Shockingly, Thiel has been apparently showing some restraint when it comes to sharing his opinions with the world. Wait, there’s worse than the Charles Manson allegory and his feelings towards the democratic process?! Also, I’m not sure if writing things down remains more dangerous than just speaking nowadays when most speeches (like this one) are being filmed and made available to everyone. What could he do? Say it’s one of those deep fake videos? The Q&A ended with a question from a journalist about the NHS, which is currently negotiating a contract with Palantir about, I don’t know, data management? I honestly don’t know what Palantir actually does, and I don’t feel like googling it. Anyway, Thiel’s sobriety once again came into question when he called the NHS a “iatrogenic institution” and added some helpful examples: “highways cause accidents”, “welfare creates poverty”, “schools make people dumb”, “the NHS makes people sick”. His solution? To privatize parts of it. How groundbreaking. Thiel’s parting advice to the audience? Talking may be important, but it’s also necessary to take action. How he chose to illustrate this? A quote from Faust: “In the beginning is the deed”. Hmm, didn’t Faust’s deeds include selling his soul? Why does Thiel like Faust so much? Is he trying to tell us something? Whatever, it’s over.
After watching these speeches, I must say I prefer Peter Thiel in writing – there’s less secondhand embarrassment. I was going to write that it was a shame that I couldn’t find a video of his speech at the New Criterion gala where he said diversity is a distraction, but given how long this damn post got, that was probably for the best. Though, I am curious about how many weird analogies and biblical quotes he managed to squeeze in between all the uhs and ums in that one.
By Danforth