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Comment by scandox | Hacker News Reader

Well in fact the raising of a huge army is indeed one of the goals of the protagonists. Of course for them the goal is to defeat evil. I'm sure that the people behind Palantir, Anduril and other such companies also believe they are building a military capability that will allow the United States to defeat what they see as evil. Every centre right libertarian I've encountered also has a "great distrust of power".

All I'm saying is that it only takes a small shift of perspective to see how the LoTR will appeal broadly to anyone who believes in good vs evil narratives - whichever side they appear to be on from one's own point of view.

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well, this assumes that the person who created Palantir identifies with the protagonists and not with mordor, and this issue with your interpretation is that peter thiel very explicitly identifies with mordor

“Gandalf’s the crazy person who wants to start a war… Mordor is this technological civilization based on reason and science. Outside of Mordor, it’s all sort of mystical and environmental and nothing works.” - Thiel 2011 Details

Source: https://bsky.app/profile/takedemocracyback.org/post/3lk4u55a... it's an interview from the September issue of details magazine 2011, has largely been scrubbed from the internet

So in the case of Thiel, he read LOTR and identified with the villains, which is about as large a misreading of Tolkien as one can make

This is the most "I'm going to build the Torment Nexus" I have seen from a tech billionaire.

> raising of a huge army is indeed one of the goals of the protagonists

It's not. They always acknowledge that their army will be much too small to defeat Sauron's in a war. They luckily win a battle outside Gondor. They defeat Sauruman only with a deus ex machina moment of supernatural aid. But when they march on Mordor they send only a token force; they know they can't win that way. They can only slow down and distract Sauron.

The way they win is trust in innocence, a thing and a plan that Sauron can't even envision - that's explicitly Gandalf's thinking. Sauron never imagines that a couple of essentially civilian hobbits, the least powerful people, would be given the Ring, and that they'd enter Morder on their own, that they'd have the courage, and that the good guys would actually destroy something of that much power when they could use it.

> it only takes a small shift of perspective to see how the LoTR will appeal broadly to anyone who believes in good vs evil narratives

I agree in a way: People who don't read the book with a little thought can just read a superficial action adventure, good guys fight bad and win. And Peter Jackson's films are 90% the latter.

This is an excellent interpretation but I would put forth that it is also possible that these people simply want to use "cool names" and get on with their business without any kind of deep understanding of the literature.

Definitely a possibility, though see

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45901389

> Every centre right libertarian I've encountered also has a "great distrust of power".

While they may be wary of others with power, right "libertarians" are often attracted to wielding the power themselves - falling to the same exact "I will do good" fallacy as wielders of the Ring. Truly being disinterested in concentrated power means acknowledging that larger non- "government" entities are capable of coercing individuals (eg informal force or even just economic stickiness), not definitionally ruling it out to remain ignorant of it.

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