Peter Thiel's Religion

>> Perhaps Thiel sees Facebook as a place to contain unbounded Mimetic violence. It simultaneously perpetuates violence and prevents it from happening. After all, if people fight on social media, they won’t fight on the streets. Like a boiling kettle, we have to let out steam somewhere. Better to cool the pot on social media than in the streets. In the words of Thiel, “social media proved to be more important than it looked.”

This just sounds wrong. If anything social media have poisoned or killed almost all human relationships that I know of. It is now almost impossible for any group of people to even grasp the idea of consensus or meeting half way. In other words FB and the likes have created a huge number of cold-conflicts waiting the smallest chance to get real...but the writer (and Thiel?) thinks it's just the opposite.

Yet I think the observations in "Millennials: Young and Yearning" are really spot-on.

I have no desire to read something that starts with the premise that evangelical Christianity is true or read an analysis that accepts that premise from the start.

> Listen to a Thiel interview and you’ll notice how often he reframes the question before answering. When he speaks, he skips between perspectives faster than a game of hopscotch. He says things like “One version of this is…” or “You could say that…” He has an uncanny ability to consider cultural trends and investment trades from a diversity of perspectives.

While Thiel did not practice very long as a lawyer, he was on track for a sterling career in that field (Stanford, appellate clerkship, S&C). I suspect his ability to see the same thing from myriad perspectives drove that success.

Oddly jagged writing, where one paragraph does not flow into the next.

Interesting, this is the first I have heard of Rene Girard's Mimetic Theory.

Even if you do not like Thiel for his political views, I think this post overall is intellectually stimulating.

> I’ve never met Peter Thiel. The contents of this essay are based on public information and my own intuition.

get this garbage outta here