New Zealand Is ‘the Future,’ Peter Thiel Said in His Push for Citizenship

From The New Yorker's profile of sama:

    “My problem is that when my friends get drunk they talk about the ways the
    world will end. After a Dutch lab modified the H5N1 bird-flu virus, five
    years ago, making it super contagious, the chance of a lethal synthetic
    virus being released in the next twenty years became, well, nonzero.”

    ...

    If the pandemic does come, Altman’s backup plan is to fly with his friend
    Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, to Thiel’s house in New
    Zealand.

Obligatory (because I don't care to defend things that people like to assume): I don't like Trump and didn't vote for him partly because of the stuff that's in the news now.

Sure... friendly people, environment, business friendly gov, familiar culture, opportunity to contribute to startup community etc. Makes sense. But other Commonwealth countries could check those boxes too -- especially Canada -- that one would expect to be far more convenient and accessible.

Even the obvious not-spoken reason -- the isolation of New Zealand and its ability to act as a haven in case of global calamity -- could find analogues in Canada's vast wilderness for a man of his means. Actually, he might already have a landing strip and bunker somewhere next to a freshwater spring in the Canadian shield (Canada has 1/5th of the world's freshwater).

That said, Canada is locked in orbit with the US; so perhaps part of his rationale is ability to escape the US sphere of influence if needed too. Canada is also less ethnically homogenous than NZ, which some people may think will matter in a doomsday scenario. New Zealand also has much higher population density... one could imagine that mix of density and isolation being important when trying to rebuild civilization.

New Zealand is a good bet because they're (1) remote, (2) English speaking, (3) very well developed and (4) has an extremely well functioning government with among the lowest perception of corruption (5) and widely-accepted travel documents.

Particularly as a notable or wealthy individual, another citizenship can make a lot of sense.

I would disagree and say that the future of the worlds environment probably looks like the opposite of New Zealand, but I'll hand it to him, the New Zealand economy does look a lot like the future of the USA in my opinion if Trump continues down his path hurting innovating industries by favouring traditional factory work: irrelevant.

As a VC Thiel is used to people saying what it takes to get what they want. I am pretty sure he's just going through the motions, much like most people who come to him asking for money in exchange for an idea that will "change the world" are doing.

I don't quite get why the snarky "make NZ great again" remark was needed in the article (isn't the NYT supposed to be a reliable news source?) however I like that it was reported because I didn't know about this. I think multi-citizenship is a strange concept but I'm all for competition among countries for citizens.

There is no mention of his helping revive the Trump campaign and how you should think "Peter Thiel" and his investments every time an executive action oppresses someone during this administration...so let's not go there.

Girard's primary thesis is that human desires are imitative, but we refuse to acknowledge this through a repeated, romantic lie about how our desires for an "object" are authentic vs. being rooted in imitation of another. This dissonance leads to periodic eruptions of violence that are themselves too imitative and escalatory, and which are only resolved through redirecting the violence onto a scapegoat:

"If two individuals desire the same thing, there will soon be a third, then a fourth. This process quickly snowballs. Since from the beginning desire is aroused by the other (and not by the object) the object is soon forgotten and the mimetic conflict transforms into a general antagonism. At this stage of the crisis the antagonists will no longer imitate each other's desires for an object, but each other's antagonism. They wanted to share the same object, but now they want to destroy the same enemy. So, a paroxysm of violence would tend to focus on an arbitrary victim and a unanimous antipathy would, mimetically, grow against him. The brutal elimination of the victim would reduce the appetite for violence that possessed everyone a moment before, and leaves the group suddenly appeased and calm. The victim lies before the group, appearing simultaneously as the origin of the crisis and as the one responsible for this miracle of renewed peace. He becomes sacred, that is to say the bearer of the prodigious power of defusing the crisis and bringing peace back."

Girard's solution to this problem is a kind of atheistic Christianity. It's essentially incumbent on each person acknowledge the truth of these structures in human society, The innocence and subsequent false deification of scapegoats (relative to the origin of mimetic violence), and walk away from them by modeling themselves after the example of Jesus' disciples.

What I think Thiel instead calculated using this philosophy is that scapegoats are the true origin of political and economic power in all forms. Since humans want to believe the romantic lie about the sincerity of their desires, they'll willingly accept false idols and their promise of transcendence through human sacrifice. Allying yourself with a political movement based on these principles is a path to wealth and power.

By the way, this is Girard's definition of Satanism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Girard

Meanwhile:

"How dare the US have different immigration laws than us"