Peter Thiel Is Taking a Break From Democracy - The Atlantic - 0 views
www.theatlantic.com/...675946
democracy tech billionaire anti-democratic stagnation immortal culture
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Thiel’s unique role in the American political ecosystem. He is the techiest of tech evangelists, the purest distillation of Silicon Valley’s reigning ethos. As such, he has become the embodiment of a strain of thinking that is pronounced—and growing—among tech founders.
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why does he want to cut off politicians
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But the days when great men could achieve great things in government are gone, Thiel believes. He disdains what the federal apparatus has become: rule-bound, stifling of innovation, a “senile, central-left regime.”
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Peter Thiel has lost interest in democracy.
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Thiel has cultivated an image as a man of ideas, an intellectual who studied philosophy with René Girard and owns first editions of Leo Strauss in English and German. Trump quite obviously did not share these interests, or Thiel’s libertarian principles.
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For years, Thiel had been saying that he generally favored the more pessimistic candidate in any presidential race because “if you’re too optimistic, it just shows you’re out of touch.” He scorned the rote optimism of politicians who, echoing Ronald Reagan, portrayed America as a shining city on a hill. Trump’s America, by contrast, was a broken landscape, under siege.
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Thiel is not against government in principle, his friend Auren Hoffman (who is no relation to Reid) says. “The ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s—which had massive, crazy amounts of power—he admires because it was effective. We built the Hoover Dam. We did the Manhattan Project,” Hoffman told me. “We started the space program.”
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Their failure to make the world conform to his vision has soured him on the entire enterprise—to the point where he no longer thinks it matters very much who wins the next election.
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His libertarian critique of American government has curdled into an almost nihilistic impulse to demolish it.
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“Voting for Trump was like a not very articulate scream for help,” Thiel told me. He fantasized that Trump’s election would somehow force a national reckoning. He believed somebody needed to tear things down—slash regulations, crush the administrative state—before the country could rebuild.
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He admits now that it was a bad bet.
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“There are a lot of things I got wrong,” he said. “It was crazier than I thought. It was more dangerous than I thought. They couldn’t get the most basic pieces of the government to work. So that was—I think that part was maybe worse than even my low expectations.”
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eid Hoffman, who has known Thiel since college, long ago noticed a pattern in his old friend’s way of thinking. Time after time, Thiel would espouse grandiose, utopian hopes that failed to materialize, leaving him “kind of furious or angry” about the world’s unwillingness to bend to whatever vision was possessing him at the moment
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Thiel. He is worth between $4 billion and $9 billion. He lives with his husband and two children in a glass palace in Bel Air that has nine bedrooms and a 90-foot infinity pool. He is a titan of Silicon Valley and a conservative kingmaker.
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“Peter tends to be not ‘glass is half empty’ but ‘glass is fully empty,’” Hoffman told me.
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he tells the story of his life as a series of disheartening setbacks.
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He met Mark Zuckerberg, liked what he heard, and became Facebook’s first outside investor. Half a million dollars bought him 10 percent of the company, most of which he cashed out for about $1 billion in 2012.
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Thiel made some poor investments, losing enormous sums by going long on the stock market in 2008, when it nose-dived, and then shorting the market in 2009, when it rallied
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on the whole, he has done exceptionally well. Alex Karp, his Palantir co-founder, who agrees with Thiel on very little other than business, calls him “the world’s best venture investor.”
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Thiel told me this is indeed his ambition, and he hinted that he may have achieved it.
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He longs for radical new technologies and scientific advances on a scale most of us can hardly imagine
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He longs for a world in which great men are free to work their will on society, unconstrained by government or regulation or “redistributionist economics” that would impinge on their wealth and power—or any obligation, really, to the rest of humanity
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Did his dream of eternal life trace to The Lord of the Rings?
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He takes for granted that this kind of progress will redound to the benefit of society at large.
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More than anything, he longs to live forever.
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Calling death a law of nature is, in his view, just an excuse for giving up. “It’s something we are told that demotivates us from trying harder,”
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Thiel grew up reading a great deal of science fiction and fantasy—Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke. But especially Tolkien; he has said that he read the Lord of the Rings trilogy at least 10 times. Tolkien’s influence on his worldview is obvious: Middle-earth is an arena of struggle for ultimate power, largely without government, where extraordinary individuals rise to fulfill their destinies. Also, there are immortal elves who live apart from men in a magical sheltered valley.
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But his dreams have always been much, much bigger than that.
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Yes, Thiel said, perking up. “There are all these ways where trying to live unnaturally long goes haywire” in Tolkien’s works. But you also have the elves.
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How are the elves different from the humans in Tolkien? And they’re basically—I think the main difference is just, they’re humans that don’t die.”
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During college, he co-founded The Stanford Review, gleefully throwing bombs at identity politics and the university’s diversity-minded reform of the curriculum. He co-wrote The Diversity Myth in 1995, a treatise against what he recently called the “craziness and silliness and stupidity and wickedness” of the left.
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Thiel laid out a plan, for himself and others, “to find an escape from politics in all its forms.” He wanted to create new spaces for personal freedom that governments could not reach
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But something changed for Thiel in 2009
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he people, he concluded, could not be trusted with important decisions. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote.
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ven more notable one followed: “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
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By 2015, six years after declaring his intent to change the world from the private sector, Thiel began having second thoughts. He cut off funding for the Seasteading Institute—years of talk had yielded no practical progress–and turned to other forms of escape
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The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom,” he wrote. His manifesto has since become legendary in Silicon Valley, where his worldview is shared by other powerful men (and men hoping to be Peter Thiel).
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Thiel’s investment in cryptocurrencies, like his founding vision at PayPal, aimed to foster a new kind of money “free from all government control and dilution
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His decision to rescue Elon Musk’s struggling SpaceX in 2008—with a $20 million infusion that kept the company alive after three botched rocket launches—came with aspirations to promote space as an open frontier with “limitless possibility for escape from world politics
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It was seasteading that became Thiel’s great philanthropic cause in the late aughts and early 2010s. The idea was to create autonomous microstates on platforms in international waters.
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“There’s zero chance Peter Thiel would live on Sealand,” he said, noting that Thiel likes his comforts too much. (Thiel has mansions around the world and a private jet. Seal performed at his 2017 wedding, at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna.)
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As he built his companies and grew rich, he began pouring money into political causes and candidates—libertarian groups such as the Endorse Liberty super PAC, in addition to a wide range of conservative Republicans, including Senators Orrin Hatch and Ted Cruz
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Sam Altman, the former venture capitalist and now CEO of OpenAI, revealed in 2016 that in the event of global catastrophe, he and Thiel planned to wait it out in Thiel’s New Zealand hideaway.
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When I asked Thiel about that scenario, he seemed embarrassed and deflected the question. He did not remember the arrangement as Altman did, he said. “Even framing it that way, though, makes it sound so ridiculous,” he told me. “If there is a real end of the world, there is no place to go.”
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You’d have eco farming. You’d turn the deserts into arable land. There were sort of all these incredible things that people thought would happen in the ’50s and ’60s and they would sort of transform the world.”
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None of that came to pass. Even science fiction turned hopeless—nowadays, you get nothing but dystopias
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He hungered for advances in the world of atoms, not the world of bits.
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Founders Fund, the venture-capital firm he established in 200
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The fund, therefore, would invest in smart people solving hard problems “that really have the potential to change the world.”
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This was not what Thiel wanted to be doing with his time. Bodegas and dog food were making him money, apparently, but he had set out to invest in transformational technology that would advance the state of human civilization.
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He told me that he no longer dwells on democracy’s flaws, because he believes we Americans don’t have one. “We are not a democracy; we’re a republic,” he said. “We’re not even a republic; we’re a constitutional republic.”
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“It was harder than it looked,” Thiel said. “I’m not actually involved in enough companies that are growing a lot, that are taking our civilization to the next level.”
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Founders Fund has holdings in artificial intelligence, biotech, space exploration, and other cutting-edge fields. What bothers Thiel is that his companies are not taking enough big swings at big problems, or that they are striking out.
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In at least 20 hours of logged face-to-face meetings with Buma, Thiel reported on what he believed to be a Chinese effort to take over a large venture-capital firm, discussed Russian involvement in Silicon Valley, and suggested that Jeffrey Epstein—a man he had met several times—was an Israeli intelligence operative. (Thiel told me he thinks Epstein “was probably entangled with Israeli military intelligence” but was more involved with “the U.S. deep state.”)
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Buma, according to a source who has seen his reports, once asked Thiel why some of the extremely rich seemed so open to contacts with foreign governments. “And he said that they’re bored,” this source said. “‘They’re bored.’ And I actually believe it. I think it’s that simple. I think they’re just bored billionaires.”
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he has a sculpture that resembles a three-dimensional game board. Ascent: Above the Nation State Board Game Display Prototype is the New Zealander artist Simon Denny’s attempt to map Thiel’s ideological universe. The board features a landscape in the aesthetic of Dungeons & Dragons, thick with monsters and knights and castles. The monsters include an ogre labeled “Monetary Policy.” Near the center is a hero figure, recognizable as Thiel. He tilts against a lion and a dragon, holding a shield and longbow. The lion is labeled “Fair Elections.” The dragon is labeled “Democracy.” The Thiel figure is trying to kill them.
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When I asked Thiel to explain his views on democracy, he dodged the question. “I always wonder whether people like you … use the word democracy when you like the results people have and use the word populism when you don’t like the results,” he told me. “If I’m characterized as more pro-populist than the elitist Atlantic is, then, in that sense, I’m more pro-democratic.”
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“I couldn’t find them,” he said. “I couldn’t get enough of them to work.
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He said he has no wish to change the American form of government, and then amended himself: “Or, you know, I don’t think it’s realistic for it to be radically changed.” Which is not at all the same thing.
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When I asked what he thinks of Yarvin’s autocratic agenda, Thiel offered objections that sounded not so much principled as practical.
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“I don’t think it’s going to work. I think it will look like Xi in China or Putin in Russia,” Thiel said, meaning a malign dictatorship. “It ultimately I don’t think will even be accelerationist on the science and technology side, to say nothing of what it will do for individual rights, civil liberties, things of that sort.”
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Still, Thiel considers Yarvin an “interesting and powerful” historian
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he always talks about is the New Deal and FDR in the 1930s and 1940s,” Thiel said. “And the heterodox take is that it was sort of a light form of fascism in the United States.”
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Yarvin, Thiel said, argues that “you should embrace this sort of light form of fascism, and we should have a president who’s like FDR again.”
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Did Thiel agree with Yarvin’s vision of fascism as a desirable governing model? Again, he dodged the question.
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“That’s not a realistic political program,” he said, refusing to be drawn any further.
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ooking back on Trump’s years in office, Thiel walked a careful line.
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A number of things were said and done that Thiel did not approve of. Mistakes were made. But Thiel was not going to refashion himself a Never Trumper in retrospect.
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“I have to somehow give the exact right answer, where it’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m somewhat disenchanted,’” he told me. “But throwing him totally under the bus? That’s like, you know—I’ll get yelled at by Mr. Trump. And if I don’t throw him under the bus, that’s—but—somehow, I have to get the tone exactly right.”
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Thiel knew, because he had read some of my previous work, that I think Trump’s gravest offense against the republic was his attempt to overthrow the election. I asked how he thought about it.
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“Look, I don’t think the election was stolen,” he said. But then he tried to turn the discussion to past elections that might have been wrongly decided. Bush-Gore in 2000, for instanc
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He came back to Trump’s attempt to prevent the transfer of power. “I’ll agree with you that it was not helpful,” he said.
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there is another piece of the story, which Thiel reluctantly agreed to discuss
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Puck reported that Democratic operatives had been digging for dirt on Thiel since before the 2022 midterm elections, conducting opposition research into his personal life with the express purpose of driving him out of politic
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Among other things, the operatives are said to have interviewed a young model named Jeff Thomas, who told them he was having an affair with Thiel, and encouraged Thomas to talk to Ryan Grim, a reporter for The Intercept. Grim did not publish a story during election season, as the opposition researchers hoped he would, but he wrote about Thiel’s affair in March, after Thomas died by suicide.
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He deplored the dirt-digging operation, telling me in an email that “the nihilism afflicting American politics is even deeper than I knew.”
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He also seemed bewildered by the passions he arouses on the left. “I don’t think they should hate me this much,”
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he spoke at the closed-press event with a lot less nuance than he had in our interviews. His after-dinner remarks were full of easy applause lines and in-jokes mocking the left. Universities had become intellectual wastelands, obsessed with a meaningless quest for diversity, he told the crowd. The humanities writ large are “transparently ridiculous,” said the onetime philosophy major, and “there’s no real science going on” in the sciences, which have devolved into “the enforcement of very curious dogmas.”
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“Diversity—it’s not enough to just hire the extras from the space-cantina scene in Star Wars,” he said, prompting laughter.
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Nor did Thiel say what genuine diversity would mean. The quest for it, he said, is “very evil and it’s very silly.”
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“the silliness is distracting us from very important things,” such as the threat to U.S. interests posed by the Chinese Communist Party.
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“Whenever someone says ‘DEI,’” he exhorted the crowd, “just think ‘CCP.’”
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Somebody asked, in the Q&A portion of the evening, whether Thiel thought the woke left was deliberately advancing Chinese Communist interests
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“It’s always the difference between an agent and asset,” he said. “And an agent is someone who is working for the enemy in full mens rea. An asset is a useful idiot. So even if you ask the question ‘Is Bill Gates China’s top agent, or top asset, in the U.S.?’”—here the crowd started roaring—“does it really make a difference?”
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About 10 years ago, Thiel told me, a fellow venture capitalist called to broach the question. Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, had made the Giving Pledge a couple of years before. Would Thiel be willing to talk with Gates about doing the same?
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Thiel feels that giving his billions away would be too much like admitting he had done something wrong to acquire them
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He also lacked sympathy for the impulse to spread resources from the privileged to those in need. When I mentioned the terrible poverty and inequality around the world, he said, “I think there are enough people working on that.”
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besides, a different cause moves him far more.
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Should Thiel happen to die one day, best efforts notwithstanding, his arrangements with Alcor provide that a cryonics team will be standing by.
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Then his body will be cooled to –196 degrees Celsius, the temperature of liquid nitrogen. After slipping into a double-walled, vacuum-insulated metal coffin, alongside (so far) 222 other corpsicles, “the patient is now protected from deterioration for theoretically thousands of years,” Alcor literature explains.
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All that will be left for Thiel to do, entombed in this vault, is await the emergence of some future society that has the wherewithal and inclination to revive him. And then make his way in a world in which his skills and education and fabulous wealth may be worth nothing at all.
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I wondered how much Thiel had thought through the implications for society of extreme longevity. The population would grow exponentially. Resources would not. Where would everyone live? What would they do for work? What would they eat and drink? Or—let’s face it—would a thousand-year life span be limited to men and women of extreme wealth?
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“Well, I maybe self-serve,” he said, perhaps understating the point, “but I worry more about stagnation than about inequality.”
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Thiel is not alone among his Silicon Valley peers in his obsession with immortality. Oracle’s Larry Ellison has described mortality as “incomprehensible.” Google’s Sergey Brin aspires to “cure death.” Dmitry Itskov, a leading tech entrepreneur in Russia, has said he hopes to live to 10,000.
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. “I should be investing way more money into this stuff,” he told me. “I should be spending way more time on this.”
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You haven’t told your husband? Wouldn’t you want him to sign up alongside you?“I mean, I will think about that,” he said, sounding rattled. “I will think—I have not thought about that.”
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No matter how fervent his desire, Thiel’s extraordinary resources still can’t buy him the kind of “super-duper medical treatments” that would let him slip the grasp of death. It is, perhaps, his ultimate disappointment.
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There are all these things I can’t do with my money,” Thiel said.
