
Peter Thiel is trying to save the world - lhh
http://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-is-trying-to-save-the-world-2016-12
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internaut
And in-depth piece from businessinsider?

> In short, he's trying to save the world from apocalypse.

I would call that accurate in two senses. Thiel believes the world faces an
existential threat and that the threat is non-fictional.

I wrote an essay with similar sentiments called "Peter & the Wolfe", where I
described it as a future where the world has Alzheimers. In the fiction book
'The Book of the New Sun' there is a powerful and deeply convincing
realization of what that is like. Unfortunately it is difficult to explain why
without actually reading it. A more analytical understanding can be had from
Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies.

If the West falls, it does not get replaced by a younger empire such as China.
A power vacuum of this scale cannot be filled. What happens is that the whole
world falls into universal stagnation and disrepair which takes down any
incumbents with it. This is not Occidental bias, this has happened before.
This is why the fate of the Roman Empire is so relevant today. When it fell,
it was inhabited by Visgoths and others roleplaying as Romans. It didn't work.
Unable to replicate.

People who claim a thousand years of darkness were anything but that are
pulling the wool over your eyes in favour of faux sophistication. They're
mistaking the periodic local maxima for global maxima because intellectuals
enjoy contrarianism and poking the previous iteration of intellectuals. We
cannot credibly think massive depopulations, people forgetting how to read and
write, the culture retreating to more primitive forms of well, everything, is
something like an alternative lifestyle choice.

I know a lot of people think this is just crazy. We have the Internet now.
Surely we couldn't simply fall apart like that. But we can. The Roman Empire
built an incredible network of roads and other infrastructure and they still
fell prey to rot and decay. Stagnation is a very weird place to be because
bits start falling off _and nobody really knows why_. And it always starts at
the peripheral, not Washington, not New York, the provinces are the first to
become dysfunctional, places in our world system like Venezuela or South
Africa. They go from bad to very bad and we don't notice because we cannot
tell the difference.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
> When [the Roman Empire] fell, it was inhabited by Visgoths and others
> roleplaying as Romans

Conversely, in the history of the world I'm currently living in, the Roman
empire had a bit of a golden age after the loss of its western parts in the
5th century, and in fact managed to hold on another thousand years or so.
Meanwhile India was doing ok under the Guptas, and while China was having a
lot of stuff going on, wiki describes the period as "it was also a time of
flourishing arts and culture, advancement in technology".

