Peter Thiel: “Hypnotic Mass Phenomena”

https://www.weltwoche.ch/ausgaben/2018-29/artikel/en-hypnotische-massenphanomene-die-weltwoche-ausgabe-29-2018.html

by ovi256 • 8 years ago

39 35 8 years ago

The ego on those people, it never fails to amaze me, condescendingly judging entire continents with thousands of years of history.

jmngomes• 8 years ago

What I read in such a statement is something along the lines of 'The people of the world do not act for my benefit and as I wish, therefore they are lame'.

The hubris is as disgusting as the person's end game is obvious.

This narrative actually reminds of https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/19/despot...

api5• 8 years ago

I think you're succumbing to a distortion brought about by Thiel's wealth and status. Ordinary people make blanket oversimplified statements all the time but because these people don't have such elevated status those statements are not taken as seriously. As a result they don't sound quite so glib.

As a general rule the higher your perceived status the more criticism you get.

Another example would be Elon's Twitter spat. Some random dude on the Internet gets into it with another random dude on the Internet and calls him some bad names and nobody cares and nobody takes it seriously, but when it's two high-profile people it's an international story.

salawat• 8 years ago

"Noblesse oblige". Or if you prefer the more modern version, "With great power comes great responsibility."

It isn't just a "distortion" or quirk. It's a social obligation that goes a long way back. The new American billionaire would do well to remember that their state of privilege comes with a whole new set of do's and don'ts that if they were smart they would pay a good deal more attention to.

The fact that many of the founding father's abhorred the idea of an aristocratic class developing is beside the point. If these magnates wish not to live under the microscope, them mayhaps they should look into actually doing something about the positive feedback loops they have exploited to get to the point they are at.

I'm sure the labor force would appreciate the wage growth, and an end to under the table non-compete clauses, and forced arbitration clauses.

notahacker• 8 years ago

I think most people talk about politics most of the time in glib generalization, but the ego bit isn't just that he (reasonably) can expect people to take his dismissal of Europe seriously, but that he dismisses it by specifically lamenting its lack of opportunities for people like him and expressing contempt for its provision of opportunities for people that are not like him. Admittedly, he was responding to some pretty leading questions.

More than anything else though, you have to admire the sheer chutzpah of someone dismissing the millions who do not share his politics as "establishment" in the middle of a discussion about his donations and advice to the President...

emsy2• 8 years ago

Do you happen to live in Europe? I live in Germany and while the Silicon Valley mentality doesn’t look healthy or sane, Germany is surprisingly “lame” for such a successful country. The German economy relies too much on old industries and the politics here are unwilling to change anything about it, be it policies, funding or infrastructure.

carlmr3• 8 years ago

I live in Germany as well and I think it's less the politics and more the culture. He's absolutely right that there's this extreme envy here when someone is successful. The US has the opposite which is unquestioning adulation of success. Germans are extremely risk averse as well. Unicorn companies (whether you need them or not) are high risk-high reward companies which usually come with something entirely new. Thiel is spot on on these two.

I'd personally add that there's a huge problem if you work in industry here and your CV doesn't have a simple path that always pointed in the same direction. Experimentation is almost culturally forbidden.

evfanknitram• 8 years ago

Interesting how he thinks that science, religion and tech is more important than politics.

moccachino• 8 years ago

I don't know how he squares that view with his support for Trump

raprp• 8 years ago

Yep. Free healthcare and 2000 euros / year university tuition really suck.

thieving_magpie• 8 years ago

US Health care costs are wildly expensive but describing healthcare in Europe as "free" seems terribly misleading.

amaccuish• 8 years ago

well it is in the UK :) (yes everyone knows tax pays for it, spreading the burdon etc.)

rando444• 8 years ago

Because in a democracy, we believe that the average person should be able to make some judgements: Do you like the funny man with the strange hairdo or do you like the mean grandmother for president in the United States? These are some common sense things that people should be able to debate. And if you say that you are not allowed to think about that, then you probably should not be allowed to think about anything.

Who on Earth is this directed at?

This is the kind of rhetoric you expect from 3rd and 4th graders.

I feel secondary embarrassment as an adult just knowing that someone that should be a peer or higher thinks like this.

Waterluvian3• 8 years ago

49something percent of voting Americans are the audience for that kind of rhetoric. And I think we fail ourselves when we fail to accept that a vast quantity of people live and vote with their emotional brain and not their logical brain.

I feel that one of the largest struggles, one of the largest causes of divide, is that to logical actors, the concept of an emotional actor is just so invalid that we believe them to be fundamentally wrong and broken and in need of fixing and education.

I'm not arguing that irrationality and emotion-driven voting is an equal alternative to rationalism. I think my point is that we can't just dismiss it as broken and in need of fixing. It's how our brains can work and it's a valid state of being.

I'm 31 and run upstairs in a panic when I switch the basement light off. Don't shake your head at how much of a fool I am, empathize with how I'm still sometimes driven by 3 million years of evolutionary practice of running away from predators.

Edit: Clarified in a child reply why my train of thought went in this direction as a response to parent.

emsy2• 8 years ago

I think his point was rather that people are expected not to think about who they vote for, even abstractly, but vote what they are socially coerced to. This is certainly true for the last US election more than any other I can remember.

olavk• 8 years ago

I assume you consider yourself a "logical actor" and the people you disagree with "emotional actors"? But I don't see how political leaning can be anything but emotional. Logic does not tell you what goals you aim for or what society you want.

untog• 8 years ago

The mentioning of his name sends shockwaves through Silicon Valley
And there he is: Rather short for being an internet giant, Mr. Thiel has a strong, dynamic appearance and an extraordinary quickness in his thought.

This is cringeworthy stuff, as introductions go.

I don't hide that I'm not particularly fond of Peter Thiel, but I'd absolutely love to read an in-depth interview with him. This is... not that.

- Asks one shallow question about the "diversity myth" then immediately pivots to "so you like Star Wars?".

- Asks about his New Zealand citizenship... but in the context of him being a fan of Tolkien, not probing any of the widely-asked questions about how he obtained it.

- He throws out lines like "We live in a world where there is too much welfare and where work is undervalued" and it's entirely unquestioned.

- "What’s your IQ?"

lispm• 8 years ago

The odd thing is that the main parts of the NATO alliance seem to be in Europe, not in America.

That was the point. Seen from the US, it is much better to defend NATO in Europe, then doing it in the US. That was also the reason why West Germany was rebuild after the war: better use Germany as a member of NATO and fight the war against the USSR in Germany. For example huge tank battles in Northern Germany... Germany was set up with all kinds of military installations as the battle ground for WWIII in Europe.

Seen from the US, there was nothing odd about it.

carlmr3• 8 years ago

Yeah, this was kind of upsetting to me that he bought into that. NATO is saving the US money for all of what they're doing in the Middle East and Africa.

api5• 8 years ago

This is a very good interview. The click bait title doesn't do it justice.

I find myself agreeing with a huge fraction of what Thiel says, but I also find myself unable to actually agree with him.

The block for me is admittedly his politics. It's not that his political views may be different from mine. That's fine. I have friends who are Marxists, democratic socialists, Christian conservatives, moderate libertarians, and admirers of Ayn Rand. But I have an Overton window just like everyone else and some things just don't fit into it.

I have no friends who are fascists and I've dropped people because they start espousing those ideas. I also have no friends who are totalitarian Soviet-style communists, and there is at least one case where I've backed away from someone for seriously espousing the idea that the USSR had it right all along. Advocacy of totalitarian ideologies with demonstrated histories of massive bloodshed is outside my Overton window. I've also backed away from people for espousing racism, misogyny, and other kinds of intellectualized assholery.

To me these are ideologies that go beyond just disagreement about how best to structure a society, how powerful government should be, or what its priorities should be. I think the thing they have in common is that they explicitly advocate hurting people and more importantly believe that you can actually make the world a better place by hurting certain people. You can make the world a better place by inflicting pain.

So back to Thiel and his politics. Nowhere in his writing have I ever heard him explicitly advocate any of those things, but the company he keeps is another story. He seems to hang around with a fair number of explicit doctrinaire fascists. I could also say the same thing about Trump. Trump does not necessarily explicitly espouse fascism (though there are some debatable statements), but his most ardent and enthusiastic supporters are fascists.

So here we go. I admire and agree with so much of what Thiel says about business, technology, and the state of the world, but how is it possible that these apparently very clear and good ideas can coexist with explicit advocacy of genocide? Or if he doesn't believe that maybe he should reconsider the company he keeps.

sillysaurus32• 8 years ago

I have no friends who are fascists and I've dropped people because they start espousing those ideas.

I think the defeat of Germany in WW2 has proved that's true.

So back to Thiel and his politics. Nowhere in his writing have I ever heard him explicitly advocate any of those things, but the company he keeps is another story. He seems to hang around with a fair number of explicit doctrinaire fascists.

explicit advocacy of genocide

Since this article's off the front page, it probably won't hurt to delve into politics for a bit here. So I have to ask: What specifically are you talking about?

api5• 8 years ago

I'm referring to his association with a certain milieu of people who are important figures in the development and promotion of what is today termed the alt-right.

Association with movements like that (or the others I mentioned) is sort of special. Movements like the alt-right are different from (for example) mainstream Christian conservatism or Randian Objectivism or democratic socialism.

Totalitarian movements whose goals would be considered insane or evil by a large number of people adopt the structure of a manipulative cult. When you encounter the Scientology guy on campus he offers to give you a weird kind of personality test. You have to be pretty deep in before you find out about galactic emperor Xenu.

The outermost surface of the alt-right (termed the alt-light in its own terminology) are people who superficially advocate nationalism, question political correctness, and so on. A layer below that you have a more hard-core layer that introduces racism, explicit anti-democratic strong-man politics, and misogyny. A layer below that you have the hard core of the movement where you find explicit advocacy of absolute totalitarianism, terrorism, and genocide.

Maybe I'm wrong but what I see is an onion that looks like:

Peter Thiel -> Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Milo Yiannopolis -> Richard Spencer -> Andrew Auernheimer, 4chan /pol

The people on the right hand side represent the true beliefs and goals of the entire onion. You see it revealed in things like the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville where the layers mix.

Compare this to for example Randian objectivism or democratic socialism. Everyone in those movements more or less espouses the same ideas. There's no onion because there's not much to hide.

In general when I see a movement with this kind of structure where the innermost people seem to espouse different ideas than the outermost I see it as a huge red flag. What are they hiding? The other thing about movements like these is that if you associate seriously and persistently with the outer layers of the onion I assume you probably know about and accept the inner layers too.

I was deeply saddened and frustrated when I saw evidence of Thiel's backing of that movement. Zero to One is still by far the best book about business I've ever read, and I found myself agreeing with I'd say about 90% of it. Thiel is also one of the few people who has seen what I've seen for years, namely that core technological development (what I call fundamental innovation) has slowed since the early 1970s. I rationalize it by acknowledging the human capacity for compartmentalization. It's possible for someone to have very rational views in one area and be completely nuts in others.

sillysaurus32• 8 years ago

Peter Thiel, six months back, you announced to move your company to Los Angeles, citing doubts about the future of Silicon Valley. And yet, here we are at the headquarters of Thiel Capital in San Francisco!

We are moving in August, keeping just one of the venture funds here in San Francisco. The judgement call that I am making is that in the next decade it will be less centralized where technology happens and that the incredible premium on this location will not be quite as big anymore.

I'm shocked that everyone here is focused on his politics when he's making one of the biggest moves SV has seen.

Sama seems to partially agree: http://blog.samaltman.com/e-pur-si-muove

aap_• 8 years ago

Why was this flagged? I think it was a rather interesting read.

plinkplonk• 8 years ago

Peter Thiel seems to be persona non grata in HN circles because he supported candidate Trump (in 2016) and later joined some sort of inner circle when Trump became president (is what I can make out from half a world away).

This kind of flagging is borderline insanity imo. (I have no stake in US or SF politics / social phenomena)

Peter Thiel: “Hypnotic Mass Phenomena”

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