The Architect of Our Doom

Exploring Peter Thiel's Evolution

I spend too much time thinking about Peter Thiel. I have tried several times to develop a long essay and psychological profile of him, but my past efforts collapsed like failed soufflés. I recommend reading Max Chalkin’s biography, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power. I also appreciated George Packer’s and Anna Weiner’s profiles of Thiel in The New Yorker.

On this theme, I recommend listening to “The Rise of the “Cognitive Elites”, a recent New Yorker podcast with Gil Duran, who writes the very important Nerd Reich newsletter, covering the tech broligarchs, NxReactionaries and the Dark Enlightenment. I agree with Duran that it is essential that more people understand the hidden agenda of the tech elites who have taken over Washington. I think it is, also, essential that people take a very close look at the historical, psychological, and ideological influences informing Thiel as well as his PayPal co-founder and conspirator Elon Musk.

Thiel and I are almost the same age, born a year apart. In “What Is It About Peter Thiel” (The New Yorker, 2021), Weiner chronicles his past:

Thiel was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1967, and first came to the United States as an infant. The family moved to Cleveland in 1968, but later relocated to what was then South West Africa, where Thiel’s father, a chemical engineer, oversaw the development of a uranium mine near Swakopmund. They returned to the U.S. when Thiel was still a young child, settling in Foster City, a middle-class suburb in the Bay Area. Chafkin describes Thiel’s upbringing as Christian and writes that his parents were eventual “fanatical Republicans.” (Thiel denies claims that his parents were Evangelical or Republican.) Thiel, meanwhile, became an archetypal nineteen-eighties geek—a talented student, chess player, and science-fiction enthusiast who was bullied by his peers.

We are shaped by some of the same cultural and generational impulses. We both love chess (although Thiel became a chess master and I remain mid-level). As adults, we have an avid interest in prophetic, philosophic, and esoteric ideas. We were both nerdy kids who played Dungeons & Dragons. I know a number of people who have worked closely with Thiel; friends through Burning Man and Summit Series. Many have a lot of respect for him. Certainly, in terms of his business acumen, Thiel’s career speaks for itself.

Thiel studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Stanford, an ultra-conservative bastion, then got a law degree. He co-founded The Stanford Review, a conservative journal. Thiel was a Right Wing ideologue before he became a technologist or a business person.

Seeking to get involved in Conservative politics, he wrote a book with his friend David Sacks, who was also from South Africa (now also a billionaire and Trump’s “crypto czar”), titled The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus (1995). The book argues that what they call “multiculture” (now rebranded as DEI) is an anti-rational, anti-individualist ideology. They write in the conclusion:

The multiculture exists to destroy Western culture, and this destruction has been ferocious and indiscriminate; the multicultural bulldozer has not drawn any distinctions between the good and the bad in Western culture… The multiculture can perhaps best be thought of as a neoprimitive culture in which individuals are not recognized as such and, in some sense, do not even exist. Instead, people conceive of their identity relationally, in a way that is profoundly dysfunctional: racial minorities in relation to racism, women in relation to sexism, homosexuals in relation to homophobia. These interdividual identities drive multicultural ressentiment and require multiculturalists to expel and denounce their (largely imaginary) enemies; instead of the rule of law, one sees an archaic scapegoating ritual gone berserk. The multiculture is profoundly antirational and seems singularly incapable of perceiving itself as it really is—perhaps one of the main reasons the whole edifice has continued for so long. As a result, the multicultural academy appears shallow and hypocritical, but these are merely symptoms of the underlying illness: The core problem with the multiculture is interdividuality itself, and any satisfactory solution to that problem will require people to transcend their interdividual identities… We believe that only a civilization centered on individual rights offers the possibility for a genuine escape from the problems that underlie the multiculture.

I wanted to share a long excerpt from this to give the flavor of Thiel’s thinking and his obsessions, even at that early age. I find it crucial we focus on Thiel and his ideology because he is the primary — still somewhat hidden — architect behind the tech elite’s shift toward the Far Right, their embrace of Trump over the last years. Through mentoring and financially supporting Right Wing operatives including JD Vance, Thiel should be understand as the architect of Silicon Valley’s takeover of the Federal Government. You can see the seeds of everything happening now in Thiel’s earliest writings and fixations.

Before I go further in looking at Thiel’s ideology, I want to note that, even though I now realize that both Thiel and Musk came from seemingly pro-apartheid and pro-Nazi family backgrounds, I still find it very difficult to understand what they are doing now and why they are doing it. Turning the government into some version of Curtis Yarvin’s untested “neocameralism” mingled with the ideology of one random libertarian screed from the late 1990s (The Sovereign Individual) seems so extreme and, also, so reckless and dangerous — not just for America and for the world, but for these people in particular.

Thiel and Musk built gigantic pyramids of wealth and power under the system of laws and protections provided by the Federal Government. The Internet — the vehicle they used to amass their wealth — was, in itself, built by taxpayer money as a government project.

Why risk destroying the US Government, the Constitution, the universities — the entire system that supported you in attaining such extraordinary wealth and privilege? What if the whole thing suddenly twists out of your grasp?

What if your revolution turns against you, Thermidor-style?