Peter Thiel Isn't a Conservative Anymore

Are there any left on the Right?

1. Peter Thiel Says Many Crazy Things

Peter Thiel went on Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times podcast around a week ago (transcript).

Their conversation was really bizarre, in many ways, but I think I finally got a sense of what Thiel and the Tech Right believe is true about the world. From what I can tell, his logic goes:

1. Stagnation is the enemy. I can’t tell if this is a very-principled stand motivated by a love of progress, or if Thiel is just bored and wants his flying car already.

2. Tech should be the solution. The only thing that can defeat stagnation is smart people with computers and freedom. In Silicon Valley, there are, theoretically, lots of smart people with computers and freedom. So why hasn’t the grand transhumanist future materialized yet?

   1. Maybe we’re not smart enough.

      1. Tyler Cowen thinks we’ve picked all the low-hanging fruit, and it’s just actually harder to figure out new things now.

   2. Maybe we’re not free enough.

      1. According to Thiel, Elon Musk’s dream of a Mars colony was supposed to be a “political project.” It was supposed to be some libertarian haven where all the future-izing could finally get done.

      2. But sometime last year, Musk gave up on this: Thiel says he realized that “the socialist U.S. government, the woke A.I. would follow you to Mars.”

3. The answer is that we’re not free enough. People are all very excited about AI and superintelligence, and Thiel agrees that it’d be good to try innovating with AI—“if you don’t have A.I., wow, there’s just nothing going on”—but it probably still won’t work.

   1. He says:

      People are really fixated on I.Q. in Silicon Valley, and that it’s all about smart people. And if you have more smart people, they’ll do great things.

      And then the economics anti-I.Q. argument is that people actually do worse. The smarter they are, the worse they do. It’s just that they don’t know how to apply it or our society doesn’t know what to do with them, and they don’t fit in. And so that suggests that the gating factor isn’t I.Q., but something that’s deeply wrong with our society.

4. Progress is bottlenecked by The Institutions. Part of it is regulatory burden (“the socialist U.S. government”), but there’s also a fundamental problem with the universities. The credentialist, safetyist administrators are choking their own researchers’ innovation.

5. Dr. Thiel prescribes chaos. If it’s not working as-is, Thiel says, we should just do random shit until it starts working again.

   1. Douthat asks: “Does populism in Trump 2.0 look like a vehicle for technological dynamism to you?”
      Thiel replies: “It’s still by far the best option we have. Is Harvard going to cure dementia by just puttering along, doing the same thing that hasn’t worked for 50 years?”

   2. But Thiel also thinks that the government needs to invest in big moonshots: “You need to try to do both,” he says.

6. Pastor Thiel is worried about the Antichrist. Trumpian chaos is a step in the right direction, but it’s no guarantee that we’ll be able to innovate smoothly soon. There’s still quite a bit of risk that the entire world falls prey to overbearing authoritarian degrowther nastiness—a one-world government headed by, and I think he’s being serious about this, the actual literal Antichrist.

   1. Not only that, the Antichrist’s already won some ground!

      1. Thiel says: “The hippies did win. We landed on the moon in July of 1969, Woodstock started three weeks later and, with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when progress stopped and the hippies won.”

      2. He cites I Thessalonians 5:3; the idea that “peace and safety” is the slogan of the Antichrist. Someone will hijack all the doomerist sentiment about climate, nuclear, and AI risk, they’ll win hearts and minds, and then subject us to some sort of one-world, safe and peaceful hellscape.

It’s hard to know what to make of all this.

Of course, it’s tempting to just dismiss it as the ramblings of some blasphemous billionaire lunatic—at one point, Thiel seems to claim that Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist.¹ At another, Douthat asks him, “You would prefer the human race to endure, right?” and Thiel responds, “Well, I don’t know” before eventually stuttering out a heavily-caveated “Yes.”

But as much as he comes off like a crank, I think Thiel is mostly right about the (non-Antichristy) facts: There really has been a Great Stagnation since the 70s:

And the hippies did, in fact, win. Some notable leaders of the wackiest, most violent countercultural sects of the 70s have gone on to live happy and accepted lives in the liberal mainstream—receiving pardons and professorships. And that’s not to mention all the relatively-normal critical theorists who’ve captured the academy.

Environmental regulations have made construction and innovation extremely difficult, especially in blue states and cities. Nuclear energy research died a sadly premature death.

I won’t necessarily endorse Thiel’s AI skepticism—I think we have very good reason to expect much more from superintelligence—but it’s certainly true that progressive, degrowther institutions are hamstringing us where we need not be hamstrung.

Peter Thiel’s diagnosis is mostly on point.

His prescription, however, is incredibly stupid.

If you’re mad about a set of overbearing regulatory policies, why not try to change the policies?

If you think the problem is a generally hostile and degrowthish culture in government, why not work to change the culture?

More specifically, why not embrace the Abundance Agenda? They’re saying all the right things about progress, regulation, and innovation. Better yet, they’ve apparently got the ear of some influential and powerful people.

Why on Earth would anyone who’s remotely pro-growth support authoritarian-populism when good normal industrial policy is an option?

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2. Peter Thiel Is a Big Fat Liar

Thiel still calls himself a conservative.

And I have no doubt that he actually used to be one—at Stanford, he mostly behaved how you’d expect a conservative to, espousing free speech rights and Western cultural values. He read Ayn Rand and admired Ronald Reagan.

But these days, Thiel is pretty obviously just coming up with new explanations and excuses for chaos.

I’m not saying that conservatives have to like stagnation or anything; they can think that growth and freedom are good, important values.

But conservatives do have to recognize that stability is also good and important. That “peace and safety” are necessary conditions for growth and innovation.

And sometimes that involves being a bit more cautious and restrictive: because you have to take seriously the idea that not every new thing is good. That there’s a downside risk to “disruption,” and that part of the government’s job is to manage and mitigate it.

But Thiel is totally dismissive of existential risks, and really any talk of risk in general. He thinks that the fear of risk is more dangerous than anything else, because it’s that fear that propels us toward an Antichristy “one-world totalitarian state.”

Thiel says that AI doomers want the “government to control all the computers, log every single keystroke, to make sure people don’t program a dangerous A.I.”

And he says that’d be like “going from the frying pan into the fire.”

But this is an insane caricature of the people who take AI risk seriously! No one is advocating for some sort of dystopian authoritarian effort to stop AI progress—if anything, they’re worried that AI progress could enable exactly that!

What a normal conservative says is: I like growth, and I like people being happy, but I’m skeptical about this new technology, because it's new: we have all these social and legal institutions that help us grow and be happy, and it seems unlikely that the institutions are ready to deal with all the crazy new things that AI will make possible. Not to mention the potential for AI itself to endanger everyone terribly!

Peter Thiel says: I like growth, and I like people being happy, but it seems like there’s not much growth, and it seems like people aren’t so happy, so why don’t we just blow this all up, empower the technologists and reroll the dice?

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3. Resentment Politics Are Bad, Actually

I think resentment is most of what’s driving Thiel’s recent kookiness. He’s mad that Silicon Valley has been constantly villainized by left-of-center people and institutions, he’s mad about wokeness, and so it doesn’t matter if his ideas make any sense, so long as the people who made him mad suffer.

Simon Laird

recently wrote an interesting defense of resentment, particularly when it comes to anti-elite New Right² politics. As far as I can tell, he thinks:

1. Resentment is sometimes justifiable. In fact, sometimes resentment is flat-out just. If you’re being treated terribly it makes sense to get angry and vengeful over it!

2. That said, resentment is also sometimes bad and wrong.

   1. But it’s usually not wrong because it’s resentment—the BLM protestors were bad and wrong not because they were too snowflakey about police shootings, but because the police shootings weren't actually happening. If the shootings were real, their resentful response would’ve been entirely justified.

3. My resentment is totally the justified kind!

   Suppose you’re a peasant in the Aztec empire in the year 1460. Every year, your village must send 5 people to the Aztec capital to be sacrificed. You must also send large quantities of corn as tribute. Your brother was sacrificed last year and eaten by the priests. Your cousin was taken by an Aztec warrior as a sex slave. Your baby son died of malnutrition during a famine after you sent all your corn to the capital. I’m sure many Aztec peasants deeply resented the rulers - and they were right to resent them. The emotion of resentment exists for a reason.

More than anything else, I think this is a stunningly good demonstration of why resentment is wrong and bad and shouldn’t be tolerated within any political movement.

A sense of justice is good. You should be well-attuned to when something wrong and unfair is going on, and you should want to fix the wrong unfairness.

But notice that I’ve written “going on,” not “happening to you”—the best kind of justice (one might say the only kind) is a justice that takes into account and benefits everyone. Justice isn’t a self-centered attitude; it’s an approach which recognizes universal dignity and universal rights.

Resentment is a shitty, self-centered version of this, at best. Resentment is the feeling you have when you get laid off, regardless of why you got laid off. If your company is downsizing because the economy’s in trouble, and you just happen to be one of the more recent hires, you'll probably feel resentful—but does that mean an injustice has been done to you? No, not really!

The BLM supporters thought about resentment the same way Laird does: as a just and measured response to some sort of elite-perpetrated evil. They resented the three or four high-profile police shootings they'd scrolled by on Instagram, and so they went out and protested and rioted and let their resentment run wild.

And they too called it (social) “justice.”

Resentment feels the same whether you’re a victim of the government’s systematic policy of villager-sacrifice, or simply a victim of big, blind economic forces. But those aren’t equivalently unjust scenarios! Our attitudes and reactions to them should differ.

The conservative says about resentment: This nasty feeling here tells me that something bad might be going on. It tells me that some sort of injustice might exist. Let me go and figure out whether that’s truly the case before I do anything stupid and rash. And if it's not clear that it is, then, yeah, I should practice “radical acceptance.” I should admit that my own success and happiness is not the most important thing in the world—that God has a plan and/or The Institutions are accomplishing something else for someone else and/or life just ain’t fucking fair, and the best thing I can do is “the hard work of letting go.”

The New Right instead says: This nasty feeling here tells me that I need to burn it all down.

Thiel and his ilk have totally given up on principled conservatism. The idea that personal responsibility matters, that stability should be valued, that society should be conserved has fallen completely out of favor on the Right.

Marxists like to say that there’s no true Left party in America—only far-right and center-right.

I think conservatives are in an even stranger bind nowadays: they’ve got to pick between a carelessly progressive option and an embarrassingly regressive one.

1. Notorious idiot Jeet Heer thinks that “he is not being metaphorical in this description.” In fact, Thiel is obviously being metaphorical: in context, he’s comparing her to a “Dr. Strangelove” type of person—famously, a fictional character. Thiel thinks that instead of being a scary cartoon villain, the Antichrist will look more like a degrowther lunatic who preaches peace and safety. Thunberg is simply a pretty well-known degrowther figure.

2. Laird and the author he’s replying to use “Dissident Right,” but I think the attitude is way too mainstream (i.e., it’s in the White House) to go by “dissident” anymore.