Thiel has no principles. He is an empire builder. His goal is to protect his wealth and build it through whatever means possible. The writing is on the wall for big tech, and he has changed his tune accordingly.
That's what GP is saying...
> Much in the same way Musk pumped his own stock and sold (along with his brother) at the top.
If he had a crystal ball about the future of the market and Tesla stock, why didn't he sell more? Seems like he left a lot of money on the table.
> Thiel has no principles. He is an empire builder. His goal is to protect his wealth and build it through whatever means possible
There are a lot of things you can say about Thiel but he's not all about protecting his wealth. He personally spent $10 million to fight Gawker for refusing a court order to take down an illegal sex tape of someone. He also suffered a huge reputational hit by supporting and funding Trump early on.
He has principles, just ones that you may not agree with.
In the antebellum South slavery was morally right, and it required to be a true outlier to speak out against it. People didn't independently discover this morality, they just copied what's popular.
This thread is discussing conflating popular opinions and truth.
I don't think this is correct, abolitionism was a thing particularly within the most religious (read:moral) groups of people. Only a tiny fraction of southerners owned slaves, most estimates put that number at under 2% of the population, and there isn't much evidence that the owners of slaves even claimed to have the moral high ground, let alone the 98% of the population that didn't own slaves.
That's not to say abolitionists saw all races as equal, and it also doesn't ignore those who tried to roll out the story of Ham to justify slavery, but there was no consensus on the morality of the institution even at its height. If there were and if it were considered the morally "right" thing to do then we would have seen far more people becoming slave owners, especially among the most religious.
Slavery was essentially a business decision, not a moral one. And not a very good business decision either, even if you can look past the evil of it all.
"The 1860 census shows that in the states that would soon secede from the Union, an average of more than 32 percent of white families owned enslaved people. Some states had far more slave owners (46 percent of families in South Carolina, 49 percent in Mississippi) while some had far fewer (20 percent of families in Arkansas)." (https://www.history.com/news/5-myths-about-slavery)
When technology changed, we could see these liberties as harmful.
Freedom to own and bear arms was OK in the times of muskets, they were too slow to reload to try a school shooting. Freedom of speech was OK when it was about freedom to print and distribute a pamphlet (which meant having cash, connection, and rare level of education = belonging to the elite).
Now we have to either scrap democracy (resort to the kind of Putinism where police state ensures that there are no school shootings, and opinions of people do not matter thus making freedom of speech harmless), or scrap freedom, like in the Western Europe where the acceptable corridor of opinions and behaviour for expressing themselves without becoming outcasts is so narrow that no sort of public activity not sanctioned by the government appears possible.
Or more likely, what's going on already will just get stronger: switch to a two-tiered world where will be large nations comprised mainly of brainwashed serfs, and smaller rich nations where elites will still enjoy all rights and freedoms - harmless because they are elites, and sustainable because they are fed by money plundered from the aforementioned large nations.
From the Online Etymology Dictionary, "freedom":
> Old English freodom "power of self-determination, state of free will; emancipation from slavery, deliverance;" see free (adj.) + -dom.
> Meaning "exemption from arbitrary or despotic control, civil liberty" is from late 14c.
> Meaning "possession of particular privileges" is from 1570s.
Isn't it interesting that the definition of freedom has changed from escape from control, to control itself? This happened roughly around the time when the Enlightenment started and liberal thoughts were beginning to spread in Europe, which is also the time when ideas of private property and capitalism were starting to take shape. Take note that one of the most fundamental "freedoms" of liberalism which is private property, can only be enforced by the state with violence or threats of violence, usually done by the police or the army. So at this point freedom has become an oxymoron, since to be free one has to submit to total authority of the law. I think neoliberalism is just an extension of this contradiction - you are encouraged to participate "freely" in the free market, which is held by the global financial system which is backed by the dollar and consequently the military powers of the United States. No matter where you escape to, any economic activity has to be done through the hegemonic powers of the world, and losing access to it means doom for your country and your people (ex. Cuba).
So I view Thiel's search for his ultimate ideal of freedom by ditching democracy is futile, since the liberal conception of freedom itself was already contradictory and impossible to achieve. He can only think of more totalitarian ways to enforce a "free" system upon the people (so probably they can do whatever they want, like you have already said). The problem is that believing in contradictions don't automatically make societies fall, as Deleuze has said: "No one has ever died from contradictions. And the more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way.” So as you have described nicely in your last sentence, most people will continue to get fucked regardless, until we fucking do something about it.
By the way, Graeber has written a lot about the subject of freedom in many of his books and papers (the most evident one being his last book "The Dawn of Everything" co-written by Wengrow.) I think you'll enjoy his works if you have some shared sympathies with Thiel's views of libertarianism, regardless of if you're labelled left/right in the current political climate. Graeber has once written about a topic Thiel was also interested in ("Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit": https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declini...), and they've also met together and had a debate about this topic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF0cz9OmCGw).
Under absolute freedom, I'm subject to the law of the jungle but otherwise unencumbered. Under absolute democracy, I'm subject to the whim of the majority.
Neither is ideal, of course, but I at least understand the law of the jungle; I'll be damned if I understand the majority, most of the time.