On Liberthielism | Hacker News Reader

On Liberthielism

terranullius.substack.com

32 pointskawera58 comments

I think we spend too much time trying to ascribe an internal consistency to famous people. Finding internal consistency with somebody doesn't change the destructive trajectory of their politics.

There is a common progression, though, from certain 'outsider' ideologies when one is an outsider to a particular form of conservatism when one gets power.

I mean, this is pretty obvious, right? Power-hungry people only hate it when other people have it.

Indeed, any sufficiently mature ideology can be rendered self consistent, either on its own or by applying layers of apologetic obfuscation. Yet innumerable self consistent ideologies are mutually irreconcilable. Self consistency is the lowest of low bars for any ideology to surmount.

Peter Thiel started Palantir.

Palmer Luckey started Anduril.

I'm waiting for a complete set of Lord of the Rings company that will "defend the West"

Númenor would be the obvious choice for seasteading, right?

Surprised it hasn't been founded already.

> I’m not here to weigh in on whether Peter Thiel is a goody or a baddy.

3 paragraphs later and that turned out to be a big old lie.

I thought it was incredibly even-handed. At least, I know I wouldn't be able to write such a dispassionate post about someone like Thiel (a baddie in my opinion, for the record).

> At least, I know I wouldn't be able to write such a dispassionate post about someone like Thiel (a baddie in my opinion, for the record).

Is that a good thing? It's unfortunate that we have lost the ability to evaluate ideas without constantly signaling our political positions.

> we have lost the ability to evaluate ideas without constantly signaling our political positions

I think this is a situation that will happen periodically, when there is more overall conflict around us.

Can you elaborate?

If anyone is interested in Thiel's motivations and interests in politics, I recommend Geoff Shullenberger's discussions:

Mimesis, Violence, and Facebook: Peter Thiel’s French Connection: Broad discussion of Thiel's writing and actions pre-2016 (when the essay was written), along with his relationship to Strauss and particularly Girard.

https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2016/08/13/mimesis-v...

Theorycels in Trumpworld: Published recently, and on the role of postmodernist-adjacent figures, including Thiel, in justifying the politics of Trump.

https://outsidertheory.com/theorycels-in-trumpworld/

If the republicans were smart, which they mostly aren’t, they would let Thiel be their nominee for president next time around. I would vote for him over nearly anyone the dems are going to throw out there.

Peter Thiel was born in Germany, acquiring American citizenship only later, and is presumably not eligible to be president of the US on that basis.

Proudly declaring "I have a great solution that no one has ever thought of before," without putting in the due diligence to understand feasibility and consequences, is close to the literal definition of the reactionary mindset.

More concisely, it is hubris plus gumption minus diligence.

The "hubris plus gumption minus diligence" mindset can be frequently found among adherents of all sorts of ideologies. If anything, reactionaries are likely to shy away from solutions that no one has ever thought of before in favor of solutions that they think have worked before.

“They think” is the key word here. It’s usually informed by woefully misinformed understandings of history and science. That’s what makes it “gumption-based” rather than “evidence-based.” This is what differentiates the reactionary from the conservative.

To some extent I agree with you, which is why I wrote "they think". Most people's ideologies are based on misinformed understandings of history and science. Reactionaries are probably more likely to be misinformed than conservatives and, in general, other kinds of moderates are. But I doubt they are more likely to be misinformed than progressives are. I think maybe in general, moderates are more likely to be well-informed than extremists. Gumption-based approaches are common among progressives and reactionaries alike. Maybe even more common among progressives, although I wouldn't put money on it.

Is a concept like 'feeding babies is better (i.e. cheaper and healthier) than jailing adults' progressive and so probably based on misinformed understandings of history and science, or is it not progressive?

I'm losing track of how this works, of late. Canadian-born Ted Cruz was able to run for president, with at least one state ruling that he was eligible[1]. Of course there were the made-up controversies about Barack Obama, which I think can be dismissed. John McCain, meanwhile, seemed to get some kind of clearance from Congress to be able to run, as we was born in the Panama Canal zone[2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cruz#Citizenship 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain#2008_presidential_...

The key words are "natural born citizen" aka you are an American citizen the moment you are born. All babies born on American soil automatically qualify, as well as babies born abroad to a US citizen. Ted Cruz and John McCain both fall in the latter category.

Interestingly this definition is commonly agreed upon but not written down in the constitution, and the Supreme Court has never taken up this challenge.

And of course our first few presidents could never have been a "natural born citizen".

Funny that you mention it. The full text is "natural born Citizen or a Citizen of the United States at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution".

Is that actually smart though? I think such a strategy would rely a lot on inertia of existing voters (he is kind of Christian but how many republicans would vote in a gay man?) as well as finding new voters (hoping for masses of new voters after a big ideology shift sounds like a good route to failure, though trump had success with it). And obviously he would need to run and win the primaries, both of which seem unlikely to me.

Honestly I think the republicans will have to stick with trump for a while yet after having tied themselves to him in the last four years. Unlike Thiel, Trump can definitely win a lot of votes. He managed to come a very close second in what, after four years of trump and half a cocked up pandemic, ought to have been an easy win for the dems.

Or here's a "hot take" he's not fucking stupid and knows something removing the USA's power without crippling China's means he's never going to get his libertarian utopia.

The USA needs to win every battle against China if he ever wants his dreams to come true is it really surprising he supports it so much???

If everything we know about a person, whether it be a Thiel, a Gates, a Soros, a Barak, a Trump, we learned through the media, and, we believe the media is biased, how much confidence should we have in our opinions of them?

I spend a lot of time working out why I believe what I believe about people I know strictly from 2nd or 3rd hand information, and for the most part, it stands on pretty soft foundations. Hence, I remain flexible in my opinions in such cases.

Meaning, I wouldn't write and publish articles that ascribe confidence in my conclusions.

This is a good article.

You can be the biggest free market capitalist in the world but it would be foolish not to acknowledge that the American government-industrial-military complex has propped up this capitalist paradise for the better part of a century.

You can be bullish on a crypto future but it would be foolish not to acknowledge that at the moment the "decentralized" part is mostly a myth, and a few early whales + Chinese miners wield a disproportionate amount of power.

None of these views are contradictory or hypocritical. The problem is really that the boxes of possible viewpoints and philosophies keep getting smaller and further apart, and everyone is expected to neatly fit into one of them.

Peter Thiel, like everyone else, makes decisions in order to maximize his own benefit, not for the sake of presenting consistency of thought to the world. Not being libertarian when it suits you is perhaps the most libertarian thing of all.

Holy crap is this missing the forest for the trees.

Thiel is a libertarian and America is his playground. There is nothing contradictory in protecting the country that his projects rely on.

It's pretty simple. Libertarians want to minimize a state's power over them. Some ways to do that are to shrink the state or somehow secede from the state.

Thiel has found a third way to be a Libertarian, albeit one that only one person can pursue at a time.

He can just own the state.

So whereas the Seasteading people have to worry about the US stepping in and invading their boat, Thiel's boat is America and he has to defend it from China.

It's about life as human being, people or even generations are progressive if they have a world to win. Once they have what they need, they will have a world to lose and become conservative. The majority of people in the west are risk adverse often in extremo and becoming more and more conservative. Funny is that they will lose a lot due to this behavior, and the cycle start will all over.

Liberalism -> risk-tolerance and experimentation -> wealth -> conservatism -> risk-averseness and stagnation -> poverty -> repeat...?

How does poverty cycle back to liberalism? Empirically and historically it does the opposite.

Institutions are much easier to destroy than to build, and some institutions can only be built on a sufficiently solid foundation. Let's hope your cycle hypothesis is wrong.

But there's a different pseudo-saying out there that works on a generation level which has been feeling more and more relevant lately. It's the one that goes:

Hard times create hard people,

hard people create good times.

Good times create weak people,

weak people create hard times.

I think I just said the same thing.

Conservatism postures as strength, but it's actually based in fear.

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