Has anyone ever actually seen him speak and thought he was intelligent? I've really tried to understand him and his views, but the dude is just completely wack.
Meanwhile, his ideological companion and shining light Curtis Yarvin has seemingly gone insane:
"We have only one problem. The problem is: our billionaires are n—ers. They may be rich. But they're n—er rich. The nature and function of their wealth is profoundly negrous. You can probably name exceptions. I can too. But in every way, the exceptions prove the rule"
"gone insane" implies that he was sane before. None of his political ideas are sane. It's just a lot of completely insane ideas, and the only notable thing about him is that for some unfathomable reason some people with money and power seem to pay some attention to him.
The fact he had to use dashes there just really demonstrates the out of control radical left liberal media cancel culture censorship (/s).
I still do think racism is a pretty impotent critique though. The driving goal of these people isn't racial segregation, but rather power. They're leaning into the latent racism in our society as a source of energy. But when you make a deal with the Devil, the Devil will always ultimately win. These people (drunk on big data and now LLMs) think they can beat the Devil at his own game, as they lead Western society to ruin.
I think he used dashes so that if someone accuses him of using the n-word, he can go "no I didn’t, hyuck hyuck!" See his use of "niggardly" later in the thread. Toddler logic.
Anyway, I’m sure at this point that Yarvin is genuinely a white supremacist who no longer feels the need to hide his true nature. Some of the racist things he says are too repulsive to serve a practical political purpose. (Like suggesting that we should bring back Black slavery to replace deported laborers.)
I'd say the practical political purpose is to normalize the idea of extreme power disparities and mass disenfranchisement, and of course the everpresent edgelord vice signalling to draw attention by appearing as some fresh alternative.
I'm not saying Yarvin is not fully steeped in white supremacy by now - I mean seriously how hard would it be to find a different word? Has he run out of words from all that prolix writing?
It just feels like a pretty ineffective and nonproductive angle of critique. It's what they expect and have already set up their individual and collective armor to deflect it (eg how "deplorables" played out).
The real problem is that authoritarian societies don't innovate. People felt this suffocation from the creeping bureaucratic authoritarianism, which is why they were tempted to buy into this autocratic garbage in the first place. But the failure modes of autocratic authoritarianism are so much worse. Never mind starting off with a demented moron at the helm, making even the initial trajectory point downwards.
The man certainly isn't a philosopher king, and in some ways; he's quite unhinged and twisted in his viewpoints, and worst of all blind to the consequences of his actions.
I used to read Yarvin back when he was writing as Moldbug. I credit him for starting my transition from a rightist-sympathizing "Libertarian" to a plain libertarian who sees so-called "right-libertarianism" as specious/fallacious ("A Brief Introduction to Unqualified Reservations" really throws down the gauntlet, and sometimes when one does that the result doesn't go one's desired way).
The real ("red pill", lol) dynamic is that rightist and leftist are essentially modes of thinking. Rightism favors deductive thinking - simple rules to follow including a social status hierarchy, a fundamentalist axiomatic conception of rights, etc. Leftism favors inductive thinking - analysis of the qualitative outcomes of given rules, avoiding formalism because every abstraction necessarily leaves something out, etc.
BOTH are required to actually fully analyze situations, otherwise you're only using half your brain!! Political propaganda emphasizes one mode of thinking while making you tune out the other (helped along because what it implies is uncomfortable, especially as you become less used to thinking that way).
But neither one makes for a full social theory on its own. Try to implement an all-encompassing "leftist" society (eg communism), and formal hierarchical rightist structures necessarily remain at the top asserting central control - the revolutionaries certainly aren't going to pack up and go back to their previous lives. Likewise, try and implement an all-compassing "rightist" society and informal bottom-up movements necessarily crop up seeking autonomy from the overbearing top-down control [1].
As such, the neoreactionary movement might have had worthwhile constructive results if they had succeeded at getting one of these so-called philosopher kings into a position of political leadership. There are a lot of things that are broken about our society, with political incentives keeping them stuck in local minima (in the computational NP-hard sense) [0].
However instead, when the neoreactionaries got a taste of political power they did exactly what every other political movement does - compromise their values to serve power. Putting on my Moldbug-thinking hat and reading Yarvin's "The Butterfly Revolution" was downright shocking. The only way you get from reactionary populism red in tooth and claw to enlightened hierarchical rule is through societal collapse, regardless of how you dress it up in flowery prose.
[0] This is a failure mode of a leftism. The corresponding failure mode of rightism is terrible destructive orders being dictated from an incompetent dictator...
[1] I think to the extent that the neofascists are aware of this, they think they are going to be able to keep it contained with digital authoritarianism, surveillance, and "AI". It fits their pattern of reading books but not understanding their lessons (specifically here sci-fi tech dystopias).
Judging by the rest of the comments on this post, they don't add much to "the conversation" either but I would think Peter Thiel "has a lot of fingers in a lot of pies", eg: Palantir.
I'm okay with the flag -- morning HN skim + dumb comment prior to work and after hours followup on my commute home.
I don’t know how evil he is or isn’t, but he took a damn f’ing long time to answer the question “should humanity continue”.
And when he did, he answered “Yes, but” and then went onto a rant about how the problem with being transvestite or transsexual is that it doesn’t go far enough and we need to be trans humans who swap their hearts and then their souls…
But he is absolutely right about that. There is in humans a sort of essence. We can't currently fully pin it down, but it is something related to our intelligence, to our feelings, to our consciousness, and to our souls. This is worth preserving.
Then there are these many other things: our skin colors, our two legged locomotion, having five fingers, lungs that breathe air. These things are not required, and could be improved our replaced without losing who we are.
You could imagine fully replacing biological humans with purely electronic robots, but such a thing is not possible at our current poor level of understanding of our essence. There is simply too high risk of losing part of it.
But in the far future with super-intelligent robots and/or genetically engineered post-humans, what could the role of a current-human even be? He would be a living fossil. A circus animal novelty, a pet? A primitive indigenous people with Terra as their reservation?
I'm convinced him doing the talk on the Antichrist was to misdirect search results in the same way Beyonce made a song called "Bodyguard" that overshadowed a controversy about an affair with her bodyguard
Yeah, there's always a twinkle of conspiracism that lights up inside me when I see something like that, and I do try to think rationally about it, but I end up coming to the conclusion... that it may not actually be that unlikely!
Naming things is easy: Why not hold a talk about the Antichrist when people have been calling you one? Why not name a single song (or even write one from scratch) to cover up some controversy. Or, of course, why not name a movie "Frozen" when there are rumors about what happened to your founders body.
I feel like the PR benefit, even if maybe intangible or purely hypothetical, is so easy to justify given the low amount of effort involved in it.
Though I do think it's rather gauche to hold a public talk about the Antichrist in Thiels situation, I think that doesn't really dispell the rumors, it just brings him and the topic closer together? No? Maybe he's just trying to tell us something. :)
I'm not saying he's trying to deflect accusations of being the Antichrist
The actual PR issue is that his interest in the Antichrist highlighted his adoration of Carl Schmitt, a Nazi philosopher and jurist who was responsible for enshrining Führerprinzip as German law
This wasn’t a religious comment. I was simply saying that he fits an archetype that has existed in western thought for quite some time. Apparently it’s too spicy to say that a radical fascist billionaire who runs a surveillance company fits a mold because it got flagged lol. Can I say that Peter Thiel is duck typed as Antichrist?
Evil is so hard to quantify, but I do believe him a sociopath, who's also comically bad at hiding it, in comparison to a lot of other C-Suite people.
I do not really think Peter Thiel fits the "Antichrist" description though, I think the biblical figure is supposed to be quite charismatic and a leader that people love, Thiel's just... not good enough at that...
The impression I get is that the antichrist gets everyone to follow him by force and fear, rather than by love. They don't worship him because they love him, they worship him because he'll kill them if they don't.
don’t worry, account age and moral viewpoints are only correlated, not linked causally! for instance, i’ve had an account for a long time and i also believe peter thiel is an evil man. it’s an easy logical fallacy to fall into! don’t feel bad for messing it up.
But who thinks Trump or Putin or Xi or Modi or Netanyahu care about what Peter Thiel's philosophy is? These kind of people don't need a Peter Thiel running around telling them about Power. They know how to take it and and they know how to keep it. Hardly matters what Thiel thinks about it.
At those levels of power, everyone knows each other. Any two pair is an ally or an adversary. There are no strangers like among us plebs. They may or may not be well educated, but they certainly know how to handle power very well. They notice each other well before either starts encroaching into the other's sphere of influence and they start preparing accordingly. At the minimum, their advisors will keep a watch.
In any case, reasonably educated people all over the world are aware of how much these wannabe techno-dictators can interfere in their domestic politics. All those countries have populations large enough to notice their philosophies and flag them to the highest level.
I like how the article puts in the same sentence that his criticism of democracy is that it's against freedom, and therefore he's authoritarian - kind of like goading us, like we're not going to notice how frothing-at-the-mouth stupid that logic is.
“Billionaire Peter Thiel insists that freedom and democracy are incompatible, and his portfolio of data mining and political bets puts that belief into practice. His is a program of authoritarian control disguised as innovation.”
Because your summarization is blatantly inaccurate. As you can clearly see above, they set the premise that Thiel believes freedom is incompatible with democracy, hence he subverts democracy with political influence and data mining in order to “preserve freedom” from HIS perspective. That’s a perfectly coherent statement for which there is plenty of evidence to support.
> Thiel wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” That wasn’t just a provocation, it was a programmatic declaration that aligns him with authoritarians both abroad and at home — culminating in a second Trump administration that daily tests the limits of US constitutional democracy.
What part of authoritarianism is pro-freedom again?
Democracy was obviously never pro-freedom - it's explicitly about the 51% taking freedom from the 49%.
I'm just confused how this twisted leftist publication has managed the mental acrobatics to claim pro-freedom means pro-authoritarianism.
Has anyone ever actually seen him speak and thought he was intelligent? I've really tried to understand him and his views, but the dude is just completely wack.
In a just world, Peter Thiel would've been given the Jack Ma treatment until he backs off.
In a just world, neither of us would have the slightest clue either of those two existed.
Because they wouldn't. I mean, they would, but they would not be in a position where we or the world would hear about them or need to care.
Meanwhile, his ideological companion and shining light Curtis Yarvin has seemingly gone insane:
"We have only one problem. The problem is: our billionaires are n—ers. They may be rich. But they're n—er rich. The nature and function of their wealth is profoundly negrous. You can probably name exceptions. I can too. But in every way, the exceptions prove the rule"
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:sefgphqp2xqwh2hawaixykwz/po...
"gone insane" implies that he was sane before. None of his political ideas are sane. It's just a lot of completely insane ideas, and the only notable thing about him is that for some unfathomable reason some people with money and power seem to pay some attention to him.
The fact he had to use dashes there just really demonstrates the out of control radical left liberal media cancel culture censorship (/s).
I still do think racism is a pretty impotent critique though. The driving goal of these people isn't racial segregation, but rather power. They're leaning into the latent racism in our society as a source of energy. But when you make a deal with the Devil, the Devil will always ultimately win. These people (drunk on big data and now LLMs) think they can beat the Devil at his own game, as they lead Western society to ruin.
I think he used dashes so that if someone accuses him of using the n-word, he can go "no I didn’t, hyuck hyuck!" See his use of "niggardly" later in the thread. Toddler logic.
Anyway, I’m sure at this point that Yarvin is genuinely a white supremacist who no longer feels the need to hide his true nature. Some of the racist things he says are too repulsive to serve a practical political purpose. (Like suggesting that we should bring back Black slavery to replace deported laborers.)
I'd say the practical political purpose is to normalize the idea of extreme power disparities and mass disenfranchisement, and of course the everpresent edgelord vice signalling to draw attention by appearing as some fresh alternative.
I'm not saying Yarvin is not fully steeped in white supremacy by now - I mean seriously how hard would it be to find a different word? Has he run out of words from all that prolix writing?
It just feels like a pretty ineffective and nonproductive angle of critique. It's what they expect and have already set up their individual and collective armor to deflect it (eg how "deplorables" played out).
The real problem is that authoritarian societies don't innovate. People felt this suffocation from the creeping bureaucratic authoritarianism, which is why they were tempted to buy into this autocratic garbage in the first place. But the failure modes of autocratic authoritarianism are so much worse. Never mind starting off with a demented moron at the helm, making even the initial trajectory point downwards.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
The man certainly isn't a philosopher king, and in some ways; he's quite unhinged and twisted in his viewpoints, and worst of all blind to the consequences of his actions.
I learned recently that Thiel was also responsible for starting the cesspit that is the Stanford Review.
Conservatives aren’t allowed media outlets on campuses? There are plenty of left-leaning ones.
Nobody said anything about banning them.
When did anyone say they're not allowed?
I used to read Yarvin back when he was writing as Moldbug. I credit him for starting my transition from a rightist-sympathizing "Libertarian" to a plain libertarian who sees so-called "right-libertarianism" as specious/fallacious ("A Brief Introduction to Unqualified Reservations" really throws down the gauntlet, and sometimes when one does that the result doesn't go one's desired way).
The real ("red pill", lol) dynamic is that rightist and leftist are essentially modes of thinking. Rightism favors deductive thinking - simple rules to follow including a social status hierarchy, a fundamentalist axiomatic conception of rights, etc. Leftism favors inductive thinking - analysis of the qualitative outcomes of given rules, avoiding formalism because every abstraction necessarily leaves something out, etc.
BOTH are required to actually fully analyze situations, otherwise you're only using half your brain!! Political propaganda emphasizes one mode of thinking while making you tune out the other (helped along because what it implies is uncomfortable, especially as you become less used to thinking that way).
But neither one makes for a full social theory on its own. Try to implement an all-encompassing "leftist" society (eg communism), and formal hierarchical rightist structures necessarily remain at the top asserting central control - the revolutionaries certainly aren't going to pack up and go back to their previous lives. Likewise, try and implement an all-compassing "rightist" society and informal bottom-up movements necessarily crop up seeking autonomy from the overbearing top-down control [1].
As such, the neoreactionary movement might have had worthwhile constructive results if they had succeeded at getting one of these so-called philosopher kings into a position of political leadership. There are a lot of things that are broken about our society, with political incentives keeping them stuck in local minima (in the computational NP-hard sense) [0].
However instead, when the neoreactionaries got a taste of political power they did exactly what every other political movement does - compromise their values to serve power. Putting on my Moldbug-thinking hat and reading Yarvin's "The Butterfly Revolution" was downright shocking. The only way you get from reactionary populism red in tooth and claw to enlightened hierarchical rule is through societal collapse, regardless of how you dress it up in flowery prose.
[0] This is a failure mode of a leftism. The corresponding failure mode of rightism is terrible destructive orders being dictated from an incompetent dictator...
[1] I think to the extent that the neofascists are aware of this, they think they are going to be able to keep it contained with digital authoritarianism, surveillance, and "AI". It fits their pattern of reading books but not understanding their lessons (specifically here sci-fi tech dystopias).
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[flagged]
Do you have anything productive to add to the conversation?
Judging by the rest of the comments on this post, they don't add much to "the conversation" either but I would think Peter Thiel "has a lot of fingers in a lot of pies", eg: Palantir.
I'm okay with the flag -- morning HN skim + dumb comment prior to work and after hours followup on my commute home.
[flagged]
I don’t know how evil he is or isn’t, but he took a damn f’ing long time to answer the question “should humanity continue”.
And when he did, he answered “Yes, but” and then went onto a rant about how the problem with being transvestite or transsexual is that it doesn’t go far enough and we need to be trans humans who swap their hearts and then their souls…
But he is absolutely right about that. There is in humans a sort of essence. We can't currently fully pin it down, but it is something related to our intelligence, to our feelings, to our consciousness, and to our souls. This is worth preserving.
Then there are these many other things: our skin colors, our two legged locomotion, having five fingers, lungs that breathe air. These things are not required, and could be improved our replaced without losing who we are.
You could imagine fully replacing biological humans with purely electronic robots, but such a thing is not possible at our current poor level of understanding of our essence. There is simply too high risk of losing part of it.
But in the far future with super-intelligent robots and/or genetically engineered post-humans, what could the role of a current-human even be? He would be a living fossil. A circus animal novelty, a pet? A primitive indigenous people with Terra as their reservation?
[dead]
I'm convinced him doing the talk on the Antichrist was to misdirect search results in the same way Beyonce made a song called "Bodyguard" that overshadowed a controversy about an affair with her bodyguard
Or when GitHub launched the Svalbard "artic code vault" to misdirect results about its involvement with ICE.
Yeah, there's always a twinkle of conspiracism that lights up inside me when I see something like that, and I do try to think rationally about it, but I end up coming to the conclusion... that it may not actually be that unlikely!
Naming things is easy: Why not hold a talk about the Antichrist when people have been calling you one? Why not name a single song (or even write one from scratch) to cover up some controversy. Or, of course, why not name a movie "Frozen" when there are rumors about what happened to your founders body.
I feel like the PR benefit, even if maybe intangible or purely hypothetical, is so easy to justify given the low amount of effort involved in it.
Though I do think it's rather gauche to hold a public talk about the Antichrist in Thiels situation, I think that doesn't really dispell the rumors, it just brings him and the topic closer together? No? Maybe he's just trying to tell us something. :)
I'm not saying he's trying to deflect accusations of being the Antichrist
The actual PR issue is that his interest in the Antichrist highlighted his adoration of Carl Schmitt, a Nazi philosopher and jurist who was responsible for enshrining Führerprinzip as German law
What a strange thing to say on a non-religious thread. The worlds not a movie
This wasn’t a religious comment. I was simply saying that he fits an archetype that has existed in western thought for quite some time. Apparently it’s too spicy to say that a radical fascist billionaire who runs a surveillance company fits a mold because it got flagged lol. Can I say that Peter Thiel is duck typed as Antichrist?
Evil is so hard to quantify, but I do believe him a sociopath, who's also comically bad at hiding it, in comparison to a lot of other C-Suite people.
I do not really think Peter Thiel fits the "Antichrist" description though, I think the biblical figure is supposed to be quite charismatic and a leader that people love, Thiel's just... not good enough at that...
...maybe just for some tech bros?
The impression I get is that the antichrist gets everyone to follow him by force and fear, rather than by love. They don't worship him because they love him, they worship him because he'll kill them if they don't.
> Evil is so hard to quantify
I would offer to qualify:
Evil
[dead]
Lotta brand new accounts posting slop lately.
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[flagged]
[flagged]
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[flagged]
Brand-new account posts slop. Gets defended with slop from brand-new account.
don’t worry, account age and moral viewpoints are only correlated, not linked causally! for instance, i’ve had an account for a long time and i also believe peter thiel is an evil man. it’s an easy logical fallacy to fall into! don’t feel bad for messing it up.
> watch as I undermine my own counterexample!
But who thinks Trump or Putin or Xi or Modi or Netanyahu care about what Peter Thiel's philosophy is? These kind of people don't need a Peter Thiel running around telling them about Power. They know how to take it and and they know how to keep it. Hardly matters what Thiel thinks about it.
At those levels of power, everyone knows each other. Any two pair is an ally or an adversary. There are no strangers like among us plebs. They may or may not be well educated, but they certainly know how to handle power very well. They notice each other well before either starts encroaching into the other's sphere of influence and they start preparing accordingly. At the minimum, their advisors will keep a watch.
In any case, reasonably educated people all over the world are aware of how much these wannabe techno-dictators can interfere in their domestic politics. All those countries have populations large enough to notice their philosophies and flag them to the highest level.
Ehud Barak, former PM of Israel, was in contact with Thiel through Epstein. So I don’t know why you think they would dismiss Thiel. https://nationalfile.com/epstein-emails-barak-thiel-surveill...
I like how the article puts in the same sentence that his criticism of democracy is that it's against freedom, and therefore he's authoritarian - kind of like goading us, like we're not going to notice how frothing-at-the-mouth stupid that logic is.
Are you referring to the opening paragraph?
“Billionaire Peter Thiel insists that freedom and democracy are incompatible, and his portfolio of data mining and political bets puts that belief into practice. His is a program of authoritarian control disguised as innovation.”
Because your summarization is blatantly inaccurate. As you can clearly see above, they set the premise that Thiel believes freedom is incompatible with democracy, hence he subverts democracy with political influence and data mining in order to “preserve freedom” from HIS perspective. That’s a perfectly coherent statement for which there is plenty of evidence to support.
Check this out:
> Thiel wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” That wasn’t just a provocation, it was a programmatic declaration that aligns him with authoritarians both abroad and at home — culminating in a second Trump administration that daily tests the limits of US constitutional democracy.
What part of authoritarianism is pro-freedom again?
Democracy was obviously never pro-freedom - it's explicitly about the 51% taking freedom from the 49%.
I'm just confused how this twisted leftist publication has managed the mental acrobatics to claim pro-freedom means pro-authoritarianism.