It seems to me he has yet again shifted his views since writing this. He has seemed to embrace politics and benefits from government spending. Does anyone who knows more about Thiel know his reasons for this change in views? To go from wanting to get rid of politics to fully embracing it?
I've became more interested in Thiel since he started his congressional campaigns. Since he seems to want to change society so much, I was curious what drove him, and what his goals were. All I found was that he and I seem to agree on many problems, but our solutions are nearly opposite, and I can't see how he arrived where he did.
Perhaps his real views were always just greed and power for the sake of it? What kind of ideology would cause someone to spend so much supporting a presidential candidate who has no ideology?
Typically the process is after 10~15 years, pretty much everyone realises that someone just like them - or even more capable - has already tried & failed to improve the situation.
At the point, the rational thing to do is just go with it and try to get in the path of the government's money hose. Principles are all well and good, but it doesn't change the fact that the government is deciding who gets to win.
>What kind of ideology would cause someone to spend so much supporting a presidential candidate who has no ideology?
I am not suggesting that Thiel fits this description, but accelerationist ideologies can potentially support such a candidate because their actions just happen to align with the goals of accelerationism.
Funny enough, most of these ideas are not his own but James Davidson, who elaborates on them in the sovereign individual. In the latest edition of the book, Thiel writes the preface.
In the pre-face, he discusses China. His thoughts on China may be encouraging his foray into politics.
Curious why do you think he wants to change society ? His ideas are kind of outdated, people don't want flying cars, they want a virtual future. Neither is he the inventor of individualist liberal ideals.
If you mean VR by “virtual future” then I see flying cars gaining more traction instead.
That said, his comments on flying cars weren’t so much about flying cars — it was about the disconnect between society’s expectations of progress in technology vs our actual progress in technology thus far.
it was about the lack of progress in the physical world, which i think is a mistake. we underestimate to what extent we are informational creatures once our basic needs are met. People choose to spend more on experiences and connectivity than on huge houses and physical luxuries.
That's a good point. I guess I should've said "influence society" or have maybe just said "seeking political power." He's started and funding multiple political campaigns, spending lots of money on it, and has been giving speech at various conservative events since 2016, or so, plus his involvement with Trump. So I guess I'm just interested in why he's so interested in politics all of a sudden. In this article from 2009, he was trying to avoid or get rid of politics.
Benefitting from government spending is not inconsistent with believing in a society free from the government.
I see the government as a parasitic and malevolent organisation who forcefully steals tens of thousands from my profits every year.
This is not inconsistent with getting benefits to reduce my taxation or apply for government grant. The more resources and benefits you can get off from your enemy, the better it is.
His beliefs are inconsistent with working for the government.
I think Peter Thiel should have sided with the libertarian party more than Donald Trump; he probably didn't do it because a libertarian victory is pretty much impossible.
In the case where a libertarian win is impossible, I'd pick republicans vs democrats as well. I don't have any hopes that republicans will reduce spending or reduce the size of the government, but at least they tend to enact redistributive policies less than their left wing counterparts.
I'm not sure if Thiel is an anarcho-capitalist, but something I've found after debating for 20 years is that left wing anarchist and anarcho-capitalists agree on the problem but not on the solution.
Anarcho capitalists think we should have a society without government and with free market capitalism.
Left wing anarchists think we should have a society without government and with individuals that voluntarily share what they have.
Depending on who you are, one explanation will make sense and the other one won't. I invite you to research the subject more and to spend time thinking how your solution could work in practice. The book that finally convinced me that anarcho capitalism might work is The Machinery of Freedom (Friedman).
I personally think that left wing anarchism and communism without a government could work if all the individuals were behaving perfectly.
I also think anarcho-capitalism could work, if we managed to privatise the entire government without creating a power imbalance between armed people and non armed people (creating one or more quasi-governments), because the evil nature of humans would be kept in check by competition in the market and reputation.
Written in short form and taken at face value, I can see why you may have this reaction to his writing. Read the sovereign individual, basically his thoughts in long form. Thiel even writes the pre-face to the book.
His main arguments are that politics divides, democracy favors the 51% at the expense of the 49%. He is for smaller government, less political divides, and the abandonment of the welfare state that creates a government dependent population with incredible waste. His ideas are not all that radical, considering debt spending by world governments is currently unsustainable.
People are largely irrational & bias. The thing about morality is everyone thinks they have the answers leading the government to be this odd form of paternalism where seemingly simple statements like "No drugs" are taken to this extreme that lead to more societal harm than good.
Even if that’s so, my problem is he thinks he should be one of the babysitters. That’s what elected officials are for.
All I owe Peter Thiel is letting him live his life. If he wants to co-opt the agency of others without consent, I don’t even owe him that.
Workers build the world. Thiel is not the smartest man in the world. There are engineers and scientists doing useful work while he grifts off government corruption he claims to hate.
When he’s participating in the management of the real human mess that enables him, he’ll have earned his place. Right now he’s a lazy nobody who has convinced people he’s worth a number that means something special.
The only number that applies to Thiel is he’s 1 of 7 billion+. Nothing more.
Thinking people need babysitters is quite the opposite of Thiel’s position. Much of his philosophy is based on the book, “The Sovereign Individual” which advocates for limited babysitters and more empowerment of the individual via hands-off governance.
He should probably remove the writings online where he literally posted exactly as I claimed.
It’s almost as if he’s the sort of person who will take whatever position fits his immediate need.
If Thiel was a genius he’d be more than another rich businessman.
I am close friends with an engineer that worked on a power transform system for the LHC. He’s a moron.
Given humans had to rely on innate intuition of acceptable effort for survival early on; quantity of food, etc, before formal language, I’m leaning into the idea human language are a cognitive boondoggle forced on us by tribal warlords.
Most humans have the same cognitive capability as Thiel, but none of the relative network access, or political burden.
So many old ways are now seen as illegal and manipulative of people too ignorant to falsify them. Thiel is no god and political corruption is everywhere. I see no reason to believe he’s special.
Print out all his dollars as official currency and they all have some words on them claiming they’re property of the US Government. Thiel’s power is reliant on big government.
Cherry picked articles aren’t going to paint a nuanced portrait.
Google is right there and I suggest you do the legwork forming your own opinions.
I’ve merely stated my own and take the position I’m not trying to influence you. Coming here for insight, well, you get what you pay for on free social media.
> He wrote how the masses need babysitters.
This article seems to indicate the opposite of 'Masses need babysitters'. Libertarian is for free-markets and free flow of ideas. Let natural forces have more of a role, than this antiquated concept of nationalism, social welfare state, paternalism, etc. Libertarian ideals & by extension Thiel want less handholding and babysitting by the government.
>Right now he’s a lazy nobody who has convinced people he’s worth a number that means something special.
Hardly know how you can call him lazy when he's on the board of multiple companies and is the CEO of one. I'm sure he's consistently working 70 hour weeks and his impact with paypal on the world alone has made him an impactful and important figure.
In the fine article, he says that freedom and democracy are at odds. This rather bizarre conception of freedom is, I'm sure, the same thought that propelled him to f(o)und that well-know force for liberation of the common man, Palantir Technologies.
(There is, obviously, no real freedom for anyone without participation in the distribution of power, i.e. democracy.)
Democracy is granting power to the majority to rule on the minority. By definition.
Democracy will never create a free society, but neither will dictatorship.
Democratic societies tend to be more free than dictatorship, but that's not always the case.
If there was an enlightened and rich dictator, he could decide to make weed legal, impose zero taxes, grant freedom of speech. Compared to most of the western world, where weed is mostly illegal, taxation is imposed forcefully and freedom of speech is disappearing - that would be a freer society.
The real way to have a freer society is to decentralise power away. It's not about granting 60 millions people an infinitesimal choice for an outcome shared by everyone. It's about each individual having a different outcome.
Decentralization transfers powers to local elites, who are more likely to be interested in interfering with you or your group specifically compared to a more or less uncaring larger government. In the US, states weren't bound by the Bill of Rights until the 14th amendment, giving them more power to restrict liberties than the federal government. After reconstruction, SCOTUS issued decisions restoring much of the pre-war order, using the 14th amendment mainly to find new powers for corporations.
> Democracy is granting power to the majority to rule on the minority. By definition.
It really isn't. Maybe "Western-style, representative democracy" implies that. But democracy in general, to me, is any system where people rule themselves. I'm not really big on voting, for one.
> If there was an enlightened and rich dictator, he
would become a horrible authoritarian within six months, no matter how good his original intentions were.
> The real way to have a freer society is to decentralise power away.
I fully agree! The world needs more food co-ops and worker-owned businesses.
Non-democratic states indeed tend to be non-free. But I think it is legitimate to think about extent of democracy vs. intrusion to personal lives.
It is probably fine to prevent someone from polluting water sources by a democratic vote.
It would be an overreach to prevent someone from grilling steaks on his porch because his neighbours are vegetarians and do not like the smell of meat.
Zoning of residential areas is somewhere in between.
Not too long ago, there was a case in Switzerland where a British person was denied citizenship by the initiative of her neighbors, because she complained too much about various topics (bells ringing too loudly etc.)
Is it legitimate to take opinions of your neighbors into account when deciding your citizenship application? It is certainly more democratic than not doing so, but at the same time, it might degenerate into a popularity contest.
The woman in question was Dutch, not British (the article says that in the first sentence). But really, she had lived in Switzerland for decades. Her children are Swiss, etc.
Thomas Jefferson had similar thoughts, a “tyranny of the majority”. Say 1 in 100 people are doctors. People are tired of paying doctors and want care for free. They put it to a vote. 99 vote to force doctors to work for free. Democracy triumphs, but at what cost? This is partly why America was founded as a republic, not a pure democracy.
99 people forcing one person (or one thousand people) into slave labour does not satisfy my definition of democracy. Of course those that are more affected by an issue should have more of a say in it. Of course democracy must be founded on basic, inviolable rights. That's the whole point.
You can't just ignore the negative aspects of a system because it doesn't suit your sensibilities. Can you do the same for a system of government you're diametrically opposed to?
> Of course those that are more affected by an issue should have more of a say in it.
So you're fine with the electoral college then, right?
> Of course democracy must be founded on basic, inviolable rights. That's the whole point.
Not really. Democracy is simply a system to decide on policies that govern a group of people and there is little inherent value in it itself. It can be used to oppress just as easily as it can protect the rights of individuals living in the system. It's dependent on the voting population. Critics of democracy simply argue that it is too easy to oppress when you give individuals direct access to the power to do so.
> You can't just ignore the negative aspects of a system because it doesn't suit your sensibilities.
What I said was, if a system of government allows one group of people to turn another group of people into slaves, then it isn't a democracy. By my definition, a democracy does not allow slavery, because a democracy must treat all citizens equally.
> Democracy is simply a system to decide on policies that govern a group of people
To me it's more than that. It's a principle of governance. Not just the how of the system, but the why.
> So you're fine with the electoral college then, right?
You mean the American system for electing presidents? I don't know exactly, I am half a world away. I will say that from here that country looks pretty bad all in all, but the fact that a single person holds so much power seems a lot more problematic than how that person is picked - although it would be interesting to see what would happen if they somehow managed to find a good one. As far as I know that's never happened.
You're using a different definition than Thiel is. His definition is simply a description of a system. If a country is a representative democracy or a direct democracy, where each person gets to vote, then it's a democracy by definition. Your definition pertains to an outcome of a system, such as equality. Neither of these are wrong definitions, since they're both commonly used in regular conversation, but you are talking at cross purposes.
Under his definition, which is what we should be talking about if we're addressing this in good faith, democracy (the system) and freedom are at odds because democracy is just majority rule. Women who can't get an abortion, rich people that have to give up 50% of their money, minorities that are discriminated against in law, victimless crimes being prosecuted (weed), and so on.
These are examples of the majority using their vote to strip the freedoms and property and time of other people.
Each day that I go to work, 1/2 of my day goes directly to the state, merely because a majority of the electorate thinks they are entitled to it. This isn't literal slavery (where 100% instead of 50% of my time is taken from me), but it's certainly not freedom when 1/2 of my productive energy is taken from me by threat of prison time if I do not comply.
> What I said was, if a system of government allows one group of people to turn another group of people into slaves, then it isn't a democracy. By my definition, a democracy does not allow slavery, because a democracy must treat all citizens equally.
Your 'definition' here doesn't coincide with reality, where a group may easily be oppressed by the majority. The fact that the example is at the most extreme does not invalidate that. Democracy does not require any sort of protections for those it is governing, just that they have a vote.
> To me it's more than that. It's a principle of governance. Not just the how of the system, but the why.
But it's not that. The principles you are ascribing to democracy are neither unique to nor a requirement for democracy. In fact quite frequently they are not. That is my point, people keep conflating democracy with these qualities that it does not possess. Advocate for those principles, not democracy.
I completely agree on the premise of the author (even if it's proving unpopular here on Hacker News, unsurprisingly). It is indeed sad to see how much freedom is declining in the world.
I don't think outer space and seasteading are viable opportunities, unfortunately. Outer space is still way too early to be practical, seasteading didn't end well for that BTC trader couple. You will always have a state actor chasing you.
With enough money, Peter Thiel could potentially militarily secure a perimeter in Somalia and experiment with a society with less government.
For most of us instead, I think the realistic option is to choose carefully where to reside and which citizenship to adopt (where possible). You can't live in a free society, but you can at least pick the least worse.
Thiel is my hero. I really can’t wait to get my green card so I can start a company, write a libertarian book and try to move the needle in the right direction.
When Elon Musk said in his interview with Tim Pool that "if we don't get off planet earth right now then we never will" I thought immediately that he was talking about exactly what Peter Thiel is talking about here. (Not surprising Elon has moved that way considering all the trouble he has been having with the government lately). I think they have both concluded that the Great Filter in the Fermi Pardox is simply technology advancing to the stage where one person or entity can enslave the rest of humanity forever. People can't have a revolution if their labor isn't needed for anything. Revolutions only work when those in power need those they rule over. Once one world government takes over, humanity will stagnate and stop progressing, just like happened every other time in history a single government took over an entire area. The only difference is this time it will be permanent, their power ensured by their robot technology that they long ago forgot how it works.
> just like happened every other time in history a single government took over an entire area.
Not sure why you think this, because, if anything, the opposite is true. Scientific and technical progress almost always arise from stable, wealthy, large societies. The Chinese empire was a leader of science theoughput much of its history. The Roman empire as well. The Arab Caliphates became bastions of science once it had conquered enough to have a massive stable area. The USA became a massive source of innovation after it had settled it's half of the continent.
The only major exception I know of for scientific progress in times of war (that is not simply weapons advancement) is the wake of WWII.
Interesting you would bring up China as it is the number one famous example of an empire stagnating for thousands of years.
The Roman Empire is well known to have made all of it's huge technological advancements in the beginning when they were a smaller, anti elitist, working class society with an emphasis on property rights and freedom. Later it became the gigantic, corruption ridden empire of upper class orgies that it was famous for.
All the wealth of scientific progress in Europe happened in the 18 hundreds after the french revolution invented the concept of Nationalism / freedom / and international trade and competition. These values disappeared from Europe in the 20th century, but were kept alive and well in the USA over that time period. Since then just about every single advancement and scientific discovery of any value has taken place in the USA. Just about everything you own was invented in America (your mass produced vehicle, internet -- no it wasn't invented at CERN -- optical fibers, almost all of your medicine, your computer techonology, your lcd screen ...everything), meanwhile nothing gets created in Europe anymore.
The early modern period - Renaissance, Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution - occurred among highly competitive, constantly warring European states.
That's almost like rejecting my example of current US inventions (or at least those from 10 years ago) because the US is technically at war in Irak or Afghanistan. The Renaissance, Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution happened in the propsperous centers of those European countries, in cities that hadn't heard of conquest for a century or more. They were also often the result of international relationships between thinkers and artists across the continent. Competition surely provided some motivation for the Industrial Revolution, but it was not the main impetus, nor was it a major factor for the others.
> The Renaissance, Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution happened in the propsperous centers of those European countries, in cities that hadn't heard of conquest for a century or more
As soon as we have robots that perform as well as a human, whoever has resources can make whatever they need (soldiers, workers) and who doesn't have resources is disposable.
There is no need to make concessions with disposable people demanding rights, you can just send killer robots and replace those people with robots.
History says otherwise. A mass of disfranchised people can stay disenfranchised indefinitely.
A ruling class tends to be toppled by some external cause - such as a foreign invasion (e.g. Iraq in 2003) or long-term changes that slowly undermine their power base. Successful revolutions and coups tend to be carried out by a small, disciplined cadre that is able to seize the moment, such as the Bolsheviks, or a clique of military officers. Unfortunately, that usually results in "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" as far as it goes for the disenfranchised masses.
I think empirical evidence suggest there is no such eternal civilization and there were a lot of absolute autocrats, monarchs and whatnot. For one reason or another they came to an end.
Libya might be a better example. Gaddafi is still the most recently successful dictator if you measure time of ruling. Allegedly he had good instincts to sense coming revolutions and other dangers. But I have no doubts that he wouldn't have been toppled at some point. I also think he was so paranoid that he didn't really have potential successors.
There are some dynasties that survived falling civilizations, but their influence is limited.
I've became more interested in Thiel since he started his congressional campaigns. Since he seems to want to change society so much, I was curious what drove him, and what his goals were. All I found was that he and I seem to agree on many problems, but our solutions are nearly opposite, and I can't see how he arrived where he did.