The Gospel According to Peter Thiel

I have a difficult relationship with Thiel. On the one hand, it is hard not to agree with some the quotes found in his Zero to One book ( "the most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd, but to think for yourself" ).

On the other, Palantir, based on what we know about it, is the embodiment of what I do not want in society. I am not sure I am happy what he did with Gawker debacle.

In other words, I am kinda interested in his gospel, but I am not sure I like what that gospel results in.

The ideas presented in this article, such as universities being bad, align closely with right-wing anti-intellectualism.

There’s nothing about university education that turns you into a submissive drone as the article suggests. It’s just thinly-veiled anti-education, perhaps even fascism. Heck, Thiel seems to want to run a floating city - perhaps with himself as the dictator (the article doesn’t say).

Thiel is just another “I’ve got mine, fuck you” billionaire who doesn’t want to give scraps to the little people. The ideas are being fluffed up as enlightened, but all I see here is someone paying for followers/disciples/high risk high reward investment opportunities. It’s easy to come up with radical experiments when you’ve got billions in the bank to cushion the failures.

Unlike someone like Bill Gates who is trying to improve the state of the world, Peter Thiel sees it as his playground to poke and mess with.

As a benefactor of two degrees from a top-ranked university and the whitest-of-the-white privilege career path of Hedge Fund Manager, along with a perfectly timed startup with no chance of replication if it were attempted just 10 years earlier or 10 years later, I have to believe and assume that many of Thiel’s libertarian ideals are based on hypocrisy and willful ignorance. Change just one input variable and he would not be a billionaire. If he were not so fabulously lucky he would be just another one of the conformist worker drones he abhors.

I’d like to think that we can see through this ruse - in reality, he’s just a wealthy guy who thinks he deserves his status, that it was 100% earned, which in turn validates a bunch of pseudo-intellectual nonsense. After all, only an incredibly enlightened smart person with “good genes” could be so wealthy and successful in the eyes of much of the self-unaware rich. [1]

[1] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2013-18043-001

Thiel is against women having the right to vote because he doesn’t like who they vote for. Knowing this makes Thiel fans angry, because they worship wealth.