Review: Peter Thiel's The Education of a Libertarian

Since our feed across social media platforms is even more full of American political content (seriously, we live in a different continent, we shouldn’t know who Lauren Bobert is, FFS) due to the ever approaching Biden VS Trump Round 2, I thought it was the perfect time for a review of Peter Thiel’s infamous The Education of a Libertarian.

I believe that politics is way too intense. That’s why I’m a libertarian. Politics gets people angry, destroys relationships, and polarizes people’s vision: the world is us versus them; good people versus the other. Politics is about interfering with other people’s lives without their consent.

By Jove, the man is a visionary! All the way back in 2009 he predicted the shitshow that American politics would become! Sadly he forgot all about it when he decided to get involved in it 7 years later. Even more ironic is the fact that, at one point, he writes about how libertarians should find a way to escape politics because that’s not the right path for the future. But let’s go back to the beginning and his stated belief of ‘authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good’. Aw, that’s nice… and is immediately followed by some bitching about how, despite his and his friends attempts at educating them, the rest of the Stanford populace decided to use their ‘authentic human freedom’ to basically refuse to adopt their views. Thiel’s description of this struggle is every bit as hyperbolic as you’d expect:

Much of it felt like trench warfare on the Western Front in World War I; there was a lot of carnage, but we did not move the center of the debate.

How tragic. And things only got worse once he exchanged the relatively small world of the Stanford campus for the much bigger New York city. Apparently, no one cared about some random guy’s word salad and few truly appreciated the wonders of capitalism. And how did smart libertarians deal with this disillusionment back then? Unlike conservatives, they ‘escaped not only to alcohol but beyond it’. So, booze and shrooms? If so, I have the sneaking suspicion that Thiel didn’t stop in the 1990s.

The 2007-09 financial crisis didn’t help the free market evangelists grow their flocks, and the government’s interference prevented it from having the same radical transforming power as the famous 1920-21 crash. How shortsighted of them. You know, I’d love to see Thiel praise Schumpeter’s concept of ‘creative destruction’ after his fortune was reduced to zero. Surely he wouldn’t let his own personal feelings get in the way of a rational analysis of the benefits for the future of the country, now, would he? His unconventional opinions on the 1920s crash are followed by the bit that got everyone talking about his essay: the notion that since welfare beneficiaries and women aren’t into libertarianism, the increase in number of the former and giving the latter the right to vote made a capitalist democracy an impossibility. Wait, does this mean he thinks women shouldn’t have been given the right to vote (and that poor people should lose theirs)?! On a clarification added to the original essay, the same from whence I took that first, prescient quote, Thiel explained that of course he doesn’t think anyone should lose the right to vote, just that he doesn’t believe voting will improve things. Because there’s too many people voting the wrong way (or too many wrong people voting)? Hmm, what happened to the whole ‘authentic human freedom’? Maybe Thiel should check a dictionary because I don’t think he knows what that word means. Anyway, he was merely stating facts about voting patterns reflecting the ‘gender gap’. Well, maybe if women weren’t discriminated against in the workplace, both through hiring practices and remuneration, and society stopped enforcing outdated gender stereotypes that demand women to be kinder and more accommodating, there’d be more wealthy women less inclined to support the welfare state with ‘confiscatory taxes’. In one shocking paragraph, Thiel speaks for the little man, denouncing the abuses American citizens are subjected to by their own government. Well, I didn’t expect that. Shrooms?

So, what is going to save America? Technology! Don’t get your hopes up, though, because there’s a dark force threatening this possibly bright future - POLITICS! According to 2009 Thiel, ‘we are in a deadly race between politics and technology’. However, in the world of technology, one individual can still make a difference. Yes, it’s amazing what happens when you get rid of that pesky democratic process that insists on giving everyone a say. Unencumbered by the masses, a single individual may well save us all with ‘the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism’. Yes, poor capitalism must be protected from all those meanies who want stop it from steamrolling the most vulnerable. Wow, I hadn’t felt this socialist in a very long time! And I’m talking European socialist, not the watered down American version. Thiel mentions 3 technological areas - Cyberspace, Outer Space, Seasteading - that can provide the new space necessary for (Thiel’s idea of) real freedom to thrive. The least promising one is rocket science, as it’s not advanced enough. Cyberspace has the downside of being a virtual rather than a real alternative world, but seen from a more hopeful perspective, those virtual worlds can create new communities and new ways to organize and enact changes in the real world. Interestingly, for someone who declared that voting had become useless due to the type of voters, Thiel doesn’t seem to care about who is forming these virtual communities and groups. I wonder how happy he is with today’s cyberspace and its assortment of false information, ignorant buffoons, and hysterical extremists on both sides yelling at each other and everyone in the middle. Is he enjoying the circus from his glass tower, or is he secretly hatching an escape plan? Thiel seems more hopeful about Seasteading, calling it a ‘realistic risk’. Really? Artificial libertarian islands are realistic? Because even before the orcas went psycho, that seemed like a pretty remote possibility.

Back in 2009, Thiel wished Patri Friedman ‘the very best in his extraordinary experiment’, but he gave up 6 years later and stopped giving money to the Seasteading Institute. Friedman, meanwhile, has also moved on to Pronomos Capital, which is still trying to build utopias, but on dry land. Something that I believe perfectly describes these projects is a quote from a 2023 article in Wired that mentioned another techno-utopian backed by Pronomos who had also wanted to create his own city 3 years previously. At the time, Twitter hadn’t been particularly kind to this dreamer and had denounced his project as ‘neocolonialism with a dash of Fyre Festival’. By the way, according to the article, that startup company appears to have disappeared, which makes it even funnier. Seriously, so much of this new cities stuff sounds like a scam. I really wouldn’t be surprised if Friedman’s next grandiose project involved magical beans.

One thing that sets this essay apart from the other Thiel writings/speeches I’ve reviewed, is the lack of Biblical quotes. This absence is particularly surprising considering he used them in The Straussian Moment, which was written before, and in Against Edenism, which was written after. Maybe he was feeling too optimistic, even in the midst of a non creatively destructive financial crisis, to mention the Antichrist? It’s so weird reading it in 2024, knowing that Thiel did the exact opposite of what he defended in his little manifesto. He even ended his clarification by saying that it would be best to focus ‘energy elsewhere, onto peaceful projects that some consider utopian’ rather than politics. Hmm, are we sure Peter Thiel wrote this? Then again, for all his apparent niceness, he outright states in the second paragraph that he doesn’t ‘believe that freedom and democracy are compatible’, and also doesn’t seem too keen on freedom of choice when the choices aren’t what he thinks is right. So, yup, it’s definitely yet another example of questionable reasoning from Silicon Valley's designated bogeyman.

By Danforth